New York now has more official coronavirus cases than any country in world, with mounting fatalities turning one of the city’s burial grounds into a mass grave visible from space.

The state of 20 million people has so far recorded 159,937 cases of Covid-19, thousands more than Spain or Italy.

The official death toll of 7,067, however, remains far lower than in both European nations, although mayor Bill de Blasio has warned of a grim surge in the number of people dying at home and in other non-hospital settings.

While most never received a diagnosis, and are not accounted for in the tally, he said there was “no question” that coronavirus is responsible, adding: “Some people are dying directly of it and some people are dying indirectly of it, but it is the tragic X factor here.”

Drone footage has captured hazmat suit-clad contractors burying bodies in mass graves on Hart Island in the Bronx.

For more than a century, the island has served as a potter’s field – a burial place for those with no next of kin or whose family are unable to arrange a funeral. Roughly a dozen people are interred each week, by low-paid prisoners at the notorious Rikers Island jail.

That number began to increase in March, as New York quickly became the epicentre of global pandemic.

While it is now deemed too dangerous for inmates to assist in burials after an outbreak at Rikers Island, contracted labourers have been hired to deal with the surge in new bodies.

They now bury about two dozen bodies on the island per day, five days a week.

Before burial, the dead are wrapped in body bags and placed inside pine caskets. The deceased’s name is scrawled in large letters on each casket, which helps should a body need to be disinterred later.

They are buried in long narrow trenches excavated by digging machines.

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“They added two new trenches in case we need them,” a Department of Correction spokesperson said. ​Motherboard reported that by 6 April, these burial pits became visible from space.

On Monday, city council health committee chair Mark Levine warned New York faces the “gruesome reality” that some people may have to be temporarily buried in city parks, with the city’s morgues, funeral homes and cemeteries already becoming overwhelmed.

The scale of the crisis – which appears to be disproportionately affecting black and Hispanic communities – has led politicians to make comparisons with the 9/11 terror attacks.

As the state recorded 799 new fatalities on Monday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo called the virus a “silent explosion that ripples through society with the same randomness, the same evil that we saw on 9/11.”

However, there was some cause for optimism on Thursday as Dr Anthony Fauci, a widely trusted authority on the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, said the US death toll will likely be closer to the 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000 estimate first given by the White House.

The US as a whole has now confirmed close to 470,000 cases of the virus.