Hospitals in Bergamo province in the Lombardy region of Italy have run out of space to store corpses of people who have succumbed to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

As a result, army lorries were called in to remove corpses from an overwhelmed Italian crematorium as the country’s death toll from coronavirus overtook that of China.

Italy announced on Thursday that 3 405 of its citizens had died from the disease, overtaking China’s 3 245 deaths and making it the country with the most coronavirus fatalities in the world.

Italian journalist Valerio Capraro posted on Twitter:

The military arrives in Bergamo to take the coffins. There’s no more space for them in the hospitals. I’ve never seen anything similar. Poor my country. Show this pic to all the people that keep minimising the situation.

Bergamo has 1.2 million people and 1 959 of the total deaths in the country have taken place in the province.

On Wednesday night the army was brought in to move 65 coffins from the cemetery in Bergamo town and take them to Modena and Bologna in Emilia-Romagna.

CFB, the area’s largest funeral director, has carried out almost 600 burials or cremations since 1 March, an unprecedented figure. CFB president Antonio Ricciardi said:

In a normal month, we would do about 120. A generation has died in just over two weeks. We’ve never seen anything like this and it just makes you cry.