For lawyer Lidia Alverisi, Argentina's COVID-19 pandemic has taken an almost unbearable toll.

"We have all lost someone, someone we knew well," she told Reuters. "In my case, it's been friends I've known for 40 years who were gone in just 10 days."

The South American nation is engulfed in a second wave of the virus that started in mid-February and is pushing hospitals close to saturation point and its citizens to despair.

By Friday, Argentina was within a hair's breadth of confirming 80,000 deaths among its 45 million citizens from the disease, with a total of nearly 3.9 million cases.

At present it ranks the third-highest in the world for average daily cases, with more total recorded per capita cases than regional giant Brazil.