The week that was: Stories from the coronavirus saga

This past week, New York got worse — far worse. In New York City, as morgue space ran out, people started wondering where the bodies will go and the funeral industry struggled to keep up. On the streets of a city accustomed to the exact opposite of social distancing, New Yorkers found a new, gentler reality.

The American president's virus briefings emerged as a strange kind of must-see TV, whether you loved them or hated them, and two Cuomo siblings — a beleaguered governor and his anchorman younger brother — became daily fixtures as well.

From France to Peru to Greece to an Ecuadorean city where bodies were piling up beyond, the effects of the virus — and the efforts to fight it — were evident all over the planet. The spaces we filled were now filled with space — even as Wuhan, China, site of the earliest known outbreak, started to reopen stores and restaurants.

Germany was scoring early wins because of more testing and intensive-care units; in Spain, where even makeshift ICUs were full, doctors were still making agonizing decisions about who to treat.

Associated Press journalists across the planet chronicled it all — in a week when they lost one of their longtime colleagues to COVID-19. This guide to some of their words and images is a diary of a world at once on pause and in the middle of the biggest fight of its generation.

HEALTH: HOSPITALS OVERWHELMED

The government passed a massive $2.2 trillion relief package to help ease the pain from the pandemic. But the money won’t solve one of the most pressing problems facing those on the front lines of fighting the virus — the lack of adequate medical equipment to care for patients and protect health care workers.

For medical supplies, the marketplace is cutthroat: States and hospital systems are...