Covid pandemic humanity's worst crisis since World War II, 30K killed in Europe

Paris: The coronavirus pandemic has claimed more than 30,000 lives in Europe alone, a global tally showed Wednesday, in what the head of the United Nations has described as humanity's worst crisis since World War II.

Italy and Spain bore the brunt of the crisis, accounting for three in every four deaths on the continent, as the grim tally hit another milestone even though half of the planet's population is already under some form of lockdown in a battle to halt contagion.

Across the Atlantic, President Donald Trump warned of a "very, very painful two weeks" as the United States registered its deadliest 24 hours of what he called a "plague".

America's outbreak has mushroomed rapidly. There are now around 190,000 known cases -- a figure that has doubled in just five days.

Some 41,000 deaths have been recorded worldwide from more than 830,000 infections since the pandemic emerged in China in December.

For UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the extraordinary economic and political upheaval spurred by the virus presents a real danger to the relative peace the world has seen over the last few decades.

The "disease... represents a threat to everybody in the world and... an economic impact that will bring a recession that probably has no parallel in the recent past.

"The combination of the two facts and the risk that it contributes to enhanced instability, enhanced unrest, and enhanced conflict are things that make us believe that this is the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War," he said.