New York, Apr 27 (IANS): With the numbers of deaths due to COVID-19 rising in the US, the Boston Globe on Sunday filled 21 pages with paid death notices, up from 16 pages the Sunday before.

The newspaper said it had to modify its layout to accommodate the overflow of death notices.

"Sunday's main news and sports sections together were 60 pages, and we set aside 20 pages for death notices," Mary Creane, Assistant Managing Editor for Production at the Globe, who was in charge of production Saturday night, was quoted as saying in a report.

"When I logged on yesterday at noon, I had a message saying we're going to need more space."

Although the newspaper managed the overflow by adding just one more page than budgeted, "it could've gone over more, quite honestly," she said.

The 21 pages of death notices on the April 26 print edition of the Boston Globe offered its readers a stark reminder of the devastation caused by the pandemic.

On the same Sunday last year - April 28, 2019 - the newspaper had only seven pages to fill with death notices.

Several of the notices running across 21 pages of the Sunday edition of the paper mentioned a battle with COVID-19.

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

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.

The death notices that filled 21 pages of the paper were submitted by people from all over Massachusetts, as well as Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, California, Florida, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Some overseas deaths in Australia, Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom were also noted, the Boston Globe said.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, over 965,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the US, while more than 54,000 have died.