World virus deaths pass 100,000, with New York area hit hard

NEW YORK (AP) — The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus surged past 100,000 on Friday as the epidemic in the United States cut a widening swath through not just New York City but the entire three-state metropolitan area of 20 million people connected by a tangle of subways, trains, and buses.

In the bedroom communities across the Hudson River in New Jersey, to the east on Long Island, and north to Connecticut, officials were recording some of the worst outbreaks in the country, even as public health authorities expressed optimism that the pace of infections appeared to be slowing.

As of Friday, the New York metropolitan area accounted for more than half the nation’s 18,000 or so deaths, with other hot spots in places such as Detroit, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C.

“Once it gets into the city, there are so many commuters and travel, it gets everywhere,” said Matt Mazewski, a Columbia University economics student who tried to get away from the epicentre by leaving his apartment near the New York City campus for his parents’ house in Long Valley, New Jersey.

Worldwide, the number of deaths hit another sad milestone, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University, while confirmed infections reached about 1.7 million.

The US is on track any day now to overtake Italy as the country with the highest number of dead, though the true figures on infections and lives lost around the world are believed be much higher because of limited testing, government cover-ups, and different counting practices.

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