Italy has registered 35,098 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Tuesday, steeply up from 25,271 on Monday.
The ministry also reported 580 COVID-related deaths against 356 the day before -- the highest daily death toll since April 14. On that day, when the whole country was in lockdown during Italy's first wave of the epidemic, there were 602 fatalities.
There were 217,758 coronavirus swabs carried out in the past day, the ministry said, against 147,725 and 191,144 on the previous two days.
A total of 42,330 people have now died because of COVID-19 in Italy since the disease came to light in February. There have been some 995,463 registered infections.
The northern region of Lombardy, centred on Italy's financial capital Milan, remained the hardest hit area on Tuesday, reporting 10,955 new cases and 129 deaths.
(Reporting by Gavin Jones, editing by Crispian Balmer)
