In New York hospitals, staff are working extra shifts and searching desperately for more bed space as they battle a surging toll of dead and infected at the US epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, which has so far claimed 385 lives across the state, patients were mostly elderly or sick, according to one respiratory therapist, who works in the New York City borough of Queens.

“Now it’s 50-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 30-year-olds,” said the employee at the Jewish Medical Center, who declined to give his name.