NEW YORK (AP) — New York authorities rushed to bring in an army of medical volunteers Wednesday as the statewide death toll from the coronavirus doubled in 72 hours to more than 1,900 and the wail of ambulances in the otherwise eerily quiet streets of the city became the heartbreaking soundtrack of the crisis.

As hot spots flared around the US in places like New Orleans, Detroit and Southern California, the nation’s biggest city was the hardest hit of them all, accounting for most of the state’s deaths, with bodies loaded onto refrigerated morgue trucks by gurney and forklift outside overwhelmed hospitals, in full view of passing motorists.

And the worst is yet to come.

“How does it end? And people want answers,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

“I want answers. The answer is nobody knows for sure.”

Across the US, Americans braced for what President Donald Trump warned could be “one of the roughest two or three weeks we’ve ever had in our country.”

The White House projected 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US before the crisis is over, and Vice President Mike Pence said models for the outbreak show the country on a trajectory akin to hard-hit Italy’s.

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