The United States recorded 1,169 COVID-19 fatalities in the past 24 hours, the Johns Hopkins University tracker showed Thursday, the highest one-day death toll recorded in any country since the Coronavirus pandemic began.

The toll reflected figures reported by the university between 8:30 pm Wednesday (0030 GMT) and the same time Thursday.

The grim record was previously held by Italy, where 969 people died on March 27.

The US has now recorded 5,926 Coronavirus deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Globally, Italy still has the highest total death toll, with 13,915 dying of the disease there, followed by Spain at 10,003.

The US also recorded more than 30,000 new cases of COVID-19 in the same 24-hour period, bringing the total number of officially reported cases in the country to more than 243,000, according to Johns Hopkins.

That is roughly a quarter of the more than a million cases reported globally.

New York City is at the epicenter of the American outbreak, recording more than 1,500 deaths and nearing 50,000 positive cases, according to figures released late Thursday by city health authorities.

More than 1.3 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted in the US, Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday at a daily White House press conference on the virus.

“We are now conducting over 100,000 Coronavirus tests per day,” President Donald Trump added at the same briefing, saying that was “more than any other country in the world, both in terms of the raw number and on a per capita basis.”

US President Donald Trump had on Tuesday warned of a “very painful” two weeks as the United States wrestles with a Coronavirus surge that the White House warns could kill as many as 240,000 Americans.

Top health experts have said that the decision to maintain strict social distancing was the only way to stop the easily transmitted virus, even if this has caused massive disruption to the economy with three quarters of Americans under some form of lockdown.

“There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviors, each of our behaviors translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic over the next 30 days,” Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator at the White House, said.

In a dire warning, the White House has projected that America’s peak death toll from the Coronavirus is likely in two weeks coinciding with Easter weekend and in a worst case scenario, a total of 100,000 to 200,000 Americans could eventually succumb to the virus.

(With agency inputs)