Nowhere has this been more apparent than in Italy, the first country in Europe to be overwhelmed by the virus in 2020 - and one of the first to impose a national lockdown. On International Nurses Day, healthcare workers there who spoke to the BBC at the start of the pandemic explain how they found ways to cope with the trauma of the last year.

"I never thought I would get my life back," says Paolo Miranda, an intensive care nurse in Cremona who last year decided to document the bleak situation inside his unit by taking photographs. The portraits showed how his colleagues were coping after the first wave - as the pandemic became the "new normal" and people stopped celebrating them as heroes.