This past Wednesday, Renzo Carlo Testa, 85, died from the coronavirus in a hospital in the northern Italian town of Bergamo. Five days later, his body was still sitting in a coffin, one of scores lined head-to-toe in the church of the local cemetery, which is itself closed to the public.

His wife of 50 years, Franca Stefanelli, would like to give him a proper funeral, but traditional funeral services are illegal throughout Italy now, part of the national restrictions against gatherings.

The ultimate metric of pandemics and plagues is the bodies they leave behind. And in Italy, with the oldest population in Europe, the toll has been heavy, with more than 2,100 deaths, the most outside of China. On Monday alone, more than 300 people died.

The bodies are piling up in the northern region of Lombardy, especially in the province of Bergamo. With 3,760 total cases reported on Monday, an increase of 344 cases from the day before, according to officials, it is at the centre of the outbreak.

Hospital morgues there are inundated. Bergamo’s mayor, Giorgio Gori, issued an ordinance that closed the local cemetery this week for the first time since World War II, though he guaranteed that its mortuary would still accept coffins.

Many of them had been sent to the Church of All Saints in Bergamo, inside the closed cemetery, where scores of waxed wooden coffins form a macabre line for cremations.

Italy will rush 10,000 student doctors into service, scrapping their final exams, in an effort to help the struggling health service cope with the coronavirus onslaught.

Some 2,158 people have died of the disease in Italy since the outbreak came to light on February 21, while the total number of confirmed cases has surged to 27,980, making Italy the worst-hit country outside of China.

The crisis has pushed hospitals to breaking point at the epicentre of the contagion in northern Italy and left other regions scrambling to strengthen their own health networks as the number of infected rises nationwide.

Student doctors

University minister Gaetano Manfredi said the government would let this year's crop of medicine graduates start work some eight or nine months ahead of schedule and waive the mandatory exams they normally sit before qualifying.

“This means immediately releasing into the National Health System the energy of about 10,000 doctors, which is fundamental to dealing with the shortage that our country is suffering,” he said in a statement.