ASSOCIATED PRESS
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CORONAVIRUS – It is more than in any country in the world. The State of New York crossed the threshold of 170,000 coronavirus patients this Friday, April 10.
The region inhabited by 20 million people thus exceeds Spain which ranked, behind the United States and its 500,000 cases, as the country with the highest number of positive cases for Covid-19 on the planet.
New York City alone has recorded as many as 93,000 cases since the start of the pandemic.
More than 2,000 deaths in 24 hours in the United States
If New York leads the most affected areas in the world in terms of the number of patients, the state remains far behind other countries in terms of people who have died from complications from Covid-19. Nearly 8,000 New Yorkers have died from the virus, compared to about 13,000 French, 16,000 Spaniards and 19,000 Italians.
The whole of the United States also became on Friday the first country in the world to exceed 2,000 deaths from the coronavirus in one day, with 2,108 additional deaths recorded in 24 hours, according to the count from Johns Hopkins University.
The total number of deaths in the United States is now 18,586, very close to the most bereaved country, Italy, but with a population five times smaller.
Why New York?
Why is New York so hit hard? New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has said it often: the city officially has 8.6 million inhabitants and is a particularly dense megalopolis with more than 10,000 inhabitants per km2. A breeding ground for the spread of infectious diseases. Millions of people use the metro and other public transport every day.
It is also one of the world’s leading tourist destinations: more than 60 million tourists per year. A virus that appeared abroad therefore has a good chance of spreading there. According to American geneticists, it started to spread in New York in February, from Europe. A study published in mid-March by the educational blog Clever ranked New York as the city “most vulnerable” to the epidemic in the United States ahead of San Francisco, Washington, Detroit and Miami.
The metropolis is also characterized by strong socio-economic inequalities, situations of overcrowding in certain working-class neighborhoods (Queens, Bronx), where many people already suffer from health problems, without access to care. These districts are now the most affected, with for example an infection rate in the Bronx twice that of Manhattan.
See also on The HuffPost: Hit hard by the coronavirus, New York digs mass graves
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