The West braces for the worst

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 fourstar 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.

And the disease 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.