Italy’s death toll surpasses China’s.

Monaco’s head of state Prince Albert II tests positive for coronavirus

Rome — Italy’s death toll from the coronavirus outbreak eclipsed China’s on Thursday as the scourge extended its march across the West, where the United States and other countries increasingly enlisted the military and improvised at every turn to get ready for the onslaught of patients.

In the U.S., the Army readied mobile military hospitals for deployment in major cities. In Madrid, a four-star hotel was turned into a hospital. Medical centers around the United States set up drive-thru testing sites that drew long lines of motorists waiting for nurses to swab their nostrils.

As the outbreak spread westward, it infected at least one European head of state: Monaco’s 62-year-old Prince Albert II, who continued to work from his office. And it appeared to be opening an alarming new front in Africa, where health care in many countries is already in sorry shape.

At the United Nations in New York, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the world is “at war with a virus” and warned that “a global recession, perhaps of record dimensions, is a near certainty.”

“If we let the virus spread like wildfire — especially in the most vulnerable regions of the world — it would kill millions of people,” he said.

Italy, with 60 million citizens, recorded a total of at least 3,405 deaths, or roughly 150 more than in China — a country with a population over 20 times larger. At the same time Italy reached its bleak milestone, Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus first emerged three months ago, recorded no new infections, a sign that the communist country’s draconian lockdowns had worked.

In a measure of how the fortunes of East and West have shifted, New York officials were sent to China to buy more ventilators. And in Italy, the leader of a delegation from the Chinese Red Cross openly castigated Italians for failing to take the country’s national lockdown seriously.

On a visit to the hard-hit city of Milan, Sun Shuopeng said he was shocked to see so many people walking around, using public transportation and eating out in hotels.

“Right now we need to stop all economic activity and we need to stop the mobility of people,” he said. “All people should be staying at home in quarantine.”

In the U.S., the damage to the world’s largest economy kept piling up, with the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits surging by 70,000 last week. On Wall Street, though, stocks rose modestly amid optimism over efforts by the Federal Reserve and other central banks to shore up the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained almost 200 points, or 1%.