Optimism Is Less Distant as Global Coronavirus Battle Rages On

Now the Italian government is preparing a slow, measured reopening. Schools will likely remain closed until September, and leaving home may be contingent on test results.

“This is an extraordinary result,” Italy’s health minister, Roberto Speranza, said on television on Tuesday evening, after the latest statistics showed that the rate of contagion had decreased from one person infecting around three people to one person infecting just one. “The measures have worked and we can finally start planning the future.”

But he emphasized that Italy could not afford to let down its guard. “It takes little to spoil the work we have done so far,” Mr. Speranza said. “It only takes wrong timing, wrong behavior, some lightness — excessive optimism.”

After Italy, the world’s coronavirus hot spot became New York State, where 6,268 have died in the pandemic, including 779 in one day this week. While most of the deaths — more than 4,000 — have been in an unnaturally quiet New York City, hundreds more have been reported in suburban Westchester and on Long Island, and officials say that others are probably dying at home, uncounted as victims of the virus.

Normally, workers from the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner arrive within a few hours to collect a body. Now the wait can be as long as 24 hours, according to Lt. Edwin Raymond, a police officer who works in northern Brooklyn and who has responded to nine 911 calls involving dead bodies in six days.

The ambulance siren has become the soundtrack of the city as deaths soared, Lieutenant Raymond said. “This thing — from a cough to a fever to pronounced within a week.”

Among the likely reasons for the high numbers, experts say, are the city’s high population density and the protracted time before stay-at-home orders were put into place. “You just got a bad hand to start with,” George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, said to a reporter calling him from New York City.