Emotional whiplash is the order of the day, perhaps nowhere more so than in Italy, where, as the nation’s daily death toll crept toward its apex, musicians under quarantine took to their balconies and lovingly called out to their neighbors with song. The documentary filmmaker Elettra Fiumi produced an audiovisual collage of the ritual for The New Yorker. The video above, her new short, “The Front Lines of COVID-19,” about the efforts of four Italian photojournalists covering the crisis, illuminates more of the juxtapositions created by life in the pandemic.

Together, the images throw into sharp relief the preceding months’ entanglement of pain and resilience, separation and solidarity. In the northern city of Bergamo, a figure in a hazmat suit lays a solitary rose on a pine coffin. In a suburb thirty miles southeast, paramedics attend to an elderly man who has fallen ill in his home. Inside a tent encampment in Sicily, an immigrant laborer ties a threadbare piece of cloth over his face to protect himself from the virus. Nearby, volunteers in face masks and latex gloves deliver groceries to a food bank.

As of this afternoon, at least twenty-four thousand people have died of COVID-19 in Italy, more than anywhere outside the United States. It is strange to reflect on the fact that the virus’s wildfire spread in Milan and Bologna and Palermo can be attributed, in part, to a culture that prizes tightly knit extended families. It’s not unusual for three generations to live under the same roof, with a nonna or nonno taking care of their grandchildren while the parents are off at work. What is normally a beautiful, adaptive feature of Italian society proved, in the presence of this contagion, to be a vulnerability. These contrasts and contradictions will be with us for years to come, even as new infections in the country appear to be in jagged decline.

The photographers’ work isn’t all dire—one of the most powerful images in the film shows a midwife who has just delivered a baby. She has her hands closed in prayer, and a disk of light behind her frames her like a halo. “Edoardo was born well,” the photographer, Alessandro Gandolfi, says. “Life continues.”

I found the moment striking. My sister and her husband are expecting a baby. Recently, she texted me her latest ultrasound image, the much anticipated anatomy scan, which reveals the baby’s face for the first time. At the clinic where it was recorded, the intake staff had taken my sister’s temperature and instructed her to put on a mask. (Her husband wasn’t permitted inside; he waited outside in the car.) I replied with a “woohoo” emoji, the one with the party horn and a sprinkle of confetti. I checked the news. The main headline on the Times’ home page read “New York Area Suffers Record Deaths.” I went back to the ultrasound, a grainy snapshot of the newest member of our family, slumbering in serene ignorance of the madness outside.

A Guide to the Coronavirus