New York, Apr 20 (IANS): Offering its readers a stark reminder of the COVID-19 death toll in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe on Sunday filled 16 pages of the paper with death notices.

These death notices are paid postings that generally announce a person's death as well as names of the surviving family members and schedules of funeral services.

Some of the death notices included in the April 19 edition of the paper included the names of people from 14 other states, besides Massachusetts, and a small number of foreign countries as well, the Globe said.

Several of the notices running across 16 pages mentioned a battle with COVID-19.

However, whether all of them died from complications associated with the disease was not clear.

The Globe had less than half the number pages with death notices for the comparable Sunday a year ago.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker on Sunday said coronavirus cases in the state are "right in the middle of the surge now."

After New York and New Jersey, Massachusetts has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the US.

Over 38,000 people have already tested positive for the virus in Massachusetts and more than 1,700 have died due to the disease.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, more than 759,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the US so far and the numbers of deaths in the country have crossed 40,000.