Italy has hit its highest daily coronavirus death toll yet, as 475 people have died in the last 24 hours alone — bringing the nation’s overall death toll to nearly 3,000 on Wednesday.

Newly released data from Italy’s Civil Protection reveals that the country’s death toll has jumped from 2,503 deaths on Tuesday to 2,978 on Wednesday, as well as from 31,506 confirmed cases on Tuesday to 35,713 on Wednesday.

Italy — Europe’s hardest hit country by the Chinese virus — has been on a nationwide lockdown while the coronavirus death toll and confirmed cases continues to rise, most of them heavily concentrated in Italy’s northern regions.

According to the head of Italy’s Civil Protection, Angelo Borrelli, among those 475 people who died in the last 24 hours, 313 are from Italy’s northern region of Lombardy, with another 65 from the nation’s northern region of Emilia-Romagna.

“It is a curve that is still growing, we are in a phase in which we are still measuring the effects of the measures taken,” said the president of Italy’s national health service Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Silvio Brusaferro, reports La Repubblica.

While the curve continues to grow in Italy’s northern regions, it, fortunately, appears to be contained in the nation’s south.

“But let us not delude ourselves,” added Brusaferro. “We must maintain the utmost rigor in the measures taken with a great sense of responsibility.”

Meanwhile, the governor of Lombardy is warning citizens that if they do not stay home, the government will get more aggressive, as victims of the Wuhan virus are not reducing, which means that hospitals will soon be “no longer able to help” new coronavirus patients.

“Unfortunately, the numbers of the infection are not decreasing, they continue to be high. In a short time, we will no longer be able to help those who get sick,” Fontana.

“Friends, I am saying this in a polite way, but in a while, we will have to change our tone because if you don’t understand this with good tones, then we have to be a little more aggressive in making it understood,” he added.

But according to the mayor of Bergamo — a city in Lombardy — the coronavirus crisis has already led to healthcare rationing in Italian hospitals, as well as patients who are “left to die” by healthcare workers, while the city’s crematory becomes so overcrowded with the bodies of those who succumbed to the Chinese virus, that it is “unable to dispose of all the work it has to do.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.