Just days after New York leaders ordered people to stay home, authorities mobilised to head off a potential public health disaster today, the city's emergence as the nation's biggest coronavirus hot spot a warning flare for the rest of the country.
A makeshift morgue was set up outside Bellevue Hospital, and the city's police, their numbers dwindling by the day as more fall sick, were told to patrol nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.
Public health officials hunted down beds and medical equipment and put out a call for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode in a matter of weeks, overwhelming hospitals the way the virus did in Italy and Spain.
Worldwide, the death toll climbed past 20,000, according to a running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. The number of dead in the US topped 800, with more than 60,000 infections.
