NEW YORK — Contract laborers have been hired by the authorities in New York to bury the dead in its potter’s field on Hart Island, a 1.5 kilometer-long island off the Bronx where more than a million mostly homeless and poor New Yorkers have been buried over the years, according to news reports.

Aerial images of mass burials are doing rounds with workers being seen using a ladder to descend into a huge pit where the coffins are stacked.

Typically, some 25 bodies are interred each week on the island, mostly for people whose families can't afford a funeral, or who go unclaimed by relatives.

Burials are now happening five days a week, with around 24 burials each day, reports said citing the Department of Correction in the city.

The images showed about 40 coffins lined up for burial on the island on Thursday and two fresh trenches had been dug in the recent days.

New York state now has more coronavirus cases than any single country, according to latest figures.

The state's confirmed caseload of Covid-19 jumped by 10,000 on Thursday to 159,937, of whom 7,000 have died.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that if the city ran out of morgue space, bodies could be temporarily individually buried on Hart Island and families would be able to reclaim them at a later date.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo described Thursday's death count as a lagging indicator, reflecting the loss of people who became sick earlier in the outbreak.

The US as a whole has recorded 462,000 cases and nearly 16,500 deaths. Globally there are 1.6 million cases and 95,000 deaths.

Spain has had 153,000 cases and Italy 143,000, while China, where the virus emerged last year, has reported 82,000 cases. — Agencies