NEW YORK 23 Mar (ANA) - Coronavirus cases in the US soared past 30,000 on Sunday as at least 388 people have died from the disease. 

New York has quickly become the US epicenter of the disease as the state now has more than 15,000 cases – up 4812 since Saturday. 

Governor Andrew Cuomo released new statistics on coronavirus in New York on Sunday as the state now has roughly 5 percent of Covid-19 cases worldwide.

 The huge increase in confirmed cases in New York is due to the virus’s ability to rapidly spread and the state’s push for more testing, which has revealed how contagious the novel coronavirus is. 

‘April is going to be worse than March. And I fear May will be worse than April,’ New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ on Sunday morning.

 ‘If the president does not act, people will die who could have lived otherwise.’ The mayor called for military assistance and additional ventilators to be sent to the city where over 8,000 have tested positive for the disease and more than 1,000.

 There have so far been at least 114 deaths linked to Covid-19 in the state, 63 of which were in the New York City area.

”If there are ventilators being produced anywhere in the country, we need to get them to New York. 

Not weeks from now or months from now, in the next 10 days,’ de Blasio said Sunday. 

Seventy percent of the people killed in the state were older than 70 and most of them had underlying health conditions, Cuomo said, adding that 80 percent of the people younger than 70 who died from the disease also had underlying health conditions. 

As coronavirus threatens to devastate New York City and overwhelm hospitals, Governor Cuomo said he plans to turn at least three landmark locations into makeshift hospitals.(ANA) 

FA/ANA/23 March 2020-----