Disturbing photos have emerged of orange body bags lining the hallways of a hospital in coronavirus epicentre New York City.

The morbid pictures at the Brooklyn hospital highlight the desperate struggle in the US to get a grip on the killer bug.

The images were captured inside and outside the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Bushwick and show deceased patients in body bags on stretchers.

Across the city, hospitals are overrun with Covid-19 patients and are having to use every available space possible.

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Disturbing images show dead bodies in orange bags waiting to be loaded onto trucks
Bodies seen outside the Brooklyn hospital on stretchers

Other photos from Wyckoff show medics in protective gear transferring bodies into refrigerated trucks, which are serving as temporary morgues, reports the Daily Mail.

Such trucks have been seen across the city, with NYC's morgues at full capacity.

NYC’s Covid-19 death toll sits at over 2,400 while more than 67,500 people across its five boroughs have tested positive.

Bodies are loaded into a makeshift morgue outside the hospital

While the virus has already claimed a total of 4,159 people in the New York state where more than 122,000 cases have also been recorded.

Saturday saw 630 deaths - a record. By Sunday morning fatalities had risen by 594 on the figure over the last 24 hour period.

However, it also meant for the first time in a week deaths had fallen slightly day-on-day, though there were 7,300 new cases.

Bodies are seen stored on top of each other in the trucks

Governor Andrew Cuomo hesitated to say the worst was definitely over but added: "The apex could be a plateau and we could be on that plateau now.

"We won’t know until you see the next few days, does it go up, does it go down." 

Cuomo also said new hospitalisations had dropped by 50 per cent in 24 hours and the number of people being discharged is "way up".

Workers wheel bodies down a ramp towards the makeshift morgues

There were 574 new hospitalizations on Sunday the governor confirmed compared to 1,095 the previous day and 1,427 on Friday.

It is the first time since March 22 that under 600 new patients were admitted with 586.

Once the peak of the epidemic passes, Cuomo said a mass roll-out of rapid testing would be critical to help the nation "return to normalcy".

It comes as the US entered one of the most critical weeks so far in the crisis, with government officials warning that the death toll in places such as New York, as well as Michigan and Louisiana, was a sign of trouble to come in other states.

Still, governors of eight states resisted issuing stay-at-home orders aimed at slowing the spread of the respiratory disease, and some churches held large Palm Sunday services in defiance of such orders in their states.

A Covid-19 patient being taken from an ambulance outside the hospital

Despite drops in the likes of New York, places such as Pennsylvania, Colorado and Washington, D.C., are starting to see rising deaths.


"This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it's not going to be localized," US Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned on Fox News on Sunday.