20,000: US death toll overtakes Italy's as Midwest braces

Twenty-four residents of an Indiana nursing home hit by COVID-19 have died, while a nursing home in Iowa saw 14 deaths. Chicago's Cook County has set up a temporary morgue that can take more than 2,000 bodies. And Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been going around telling groups of people to "break it up."

In Europe, countries used roadblocks, drones, helicopters, mounted patrols and the threat of fines to keep people from traveling over Easter weekend. And with infections and deaths slowing in Italy, Spain and other places on the Continent, governments took tentative steps toward loosening the weeks-long shutdowns.

Glorious weather across Europe posed an extra test of people's discipline.

"Don't do silly things," said Domenico Arcuri, Italy's special commissioner for the virus emergency. "Don't go out, continue to behave responsibly as you have done until today, use your head and your sense of responsibility." The outbreak's center of gravity has long since shifted from China to Europe and the United State s, which now has by far the largest number of confirmed cases — over a half-million — and a death toll higher than Italy's count of nearly 19,500, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.

The death rate — that is, the number of dead relative to the population — is still far higher in Italy than in US, which has more than five times as many people.