Advertisement

AP PHOTOS: A week of images from the coronavirus pandemic

Cemetery workers wore protective clothing as they conducted a burial in Brazil, a field of freshly dug graves awaiting more corpses. In Spain, a stockpile of caskets stood ready for burials or cremations.

In the last week, the coronavirus pandemic yielded images showing much of the world still frozen in place. But the business of death continued apace. A funeral home in Brooklyn, New York, that is normally equipped for 40 to 60 cases at a time was handling more than 180. A body lay wrapped in white plastic for a mortician.

Elsewhere, the fight to save the living pushed on. Health care workers in Spain toiled in a library that was turned into an intensive care unit, five figures in blue gowns clustered around a patient near a panel of medical machines. A hospital ship arrived in New York, bringing 1,000 more beds to ease the strain on the city's hospitals.

People hoping to evade the virus watched and worried. A masked man in Wuhan, China, where the disease first emerged, peered over barriers used to seal off a neighborhood. Ciro Orlando Gijon, 78, waited to apply for help after the mayor of Lima, Peru, reported that a bullring would offer shelter and balanced meals for some of the city’s homeless.