Italy in peril: 5,000 new Covid-19 cases registered in one day

Italy is seriously struggling to contain the Covid-19 pandemic as it reported around 5,000 new coronavirus cases on Friday and the highest number of deaths in a single day: 627.

Italy now has a total of 47,021 cases, over 37,000 of which are active. This is the highest number of cases worldwide.

Emergency Commissioner Angelo Borelli said a lot of people at home did not require hospitalisation as he announced that 698 individuals had recovered from the disease on Friday.

The death toll from the novel virus has surpassed 5,000 in Europe - the new epicentre of the pandemic - as Italy, Germany and Spain continue to record a steep rise in infections.

Meanwhile, at least 1,000 people have died in Spain so far from the Covid-19 disease, while the total number of infections in the country has reached almost 20,000.

More than 209,000 people have been infected by the coronavirus globally and more than 8,700 have died, according to the World Health Organization. 

At least 86,000 have recovered from Covid-19, according to data collected by the Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

A previous version of this article read that 15,000 new cases of coronavirus cases were registered in Italy as erroneously quoted in Italian news sources. The figure is 5,986.