Spain has now surpassed China in its number of fatalities due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The latest government tally puts the number of deaths at 3,434.

The Spanish health ministry said it has registered 738 new coronavirus deaths since Tuesday. The overall number of cases in the southern European nation has soared to 47,610, from 39,673 the day before.

There have been 3,281 coronavirus death on mainland China so far, according to official statistics.

The country, where the global outbreak started, has managed to quash the Covid-19 epidemic with tight quarantine measures. It still gets its share of new cases of the disease though, authorities say, as it imports them from other nations.

Meanwhile, Spain is not the only European country to top China in the sad statistics of fatalities. The death toll in Italy surpassed that of China last week as the infection overwhelmed its health system. It has 6,820 reported fatalities so far.

Spain is also struggling to deal with the health crisis. Madrid has had to repurpose the giant ice rink of the Palacio de Hielo as a storage facility for the bodies that city morgues have no capacity to collect and bury.

The Madrid metropolitan area, where the outbreak initially started in Spain, has the most cases of any Spanish region. The Basque Country in the north has also been hit hard.

Spanish authorities have been forced to use a Madrid ice rink as a makeshift morgue on ice to cope with the soaring death toll from coronavirus in the country.

In the country’s capital, the Palacio de Hielo (Ice Palace) ice rink is usually used for skating, hockey and curling but has since been transformed into a morgue next to a specially-converted hospital for patients infected with Covid-19.