At Vila Formosa, Latin America’s biggest cemetery, mourning loved ones has become somewhat fraught.
Families are strictly limited to an hour with the coffin in the chapel of rest and no more than 10 people are allowed in. All in the name of curbing the spread of Covid-19.
For gravediggers and undertakers, the rules have become even tighter. When they prepare a burial, they’re handed a piece of paper – on the top right, there’s a code. D3 means a suspected or confirmed coronavirus death. It also means they have to wear full protective suits, masks and gloves.
Workers at Vila Formosa, in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, say they’re turning over more graves than normal. On an average day, they bury about 40 bodies at the cemetery. The weekend before last it, that figure was about 60.
The municipality bought 5,000 body bags and they’re hiring more people, too,” says gravedigger Manuel Pereira. But they’re bracing themselves for the weeks ahead.
Brazil’s health ministry says the peak is not expected in the country until May or June.
In one corner of the cemetery, a coffin is removed from a hearse and six undertakers in white overalls walk over fresh red soil to a newly-dug grave.
Maria Odete died at the age of 77 from suspected coronavirus. The family have come wearing masks and observing social distancing, a few hugs are given to those who need them, and just a short round of applause follows.
I’m really sad and worried about the situation,” says Sandro Nunes, her son. He never imagined saying goodbye to his mother like this.
“I wasn’t taking it too seriously before. I thought it was the media stirring things up. Then, when it happened to our family, we understood the severity of it.”
Maria Odete’s family won’t find out for sure whether or not she had Covid-19 until at least two weeks after her burial. This is a pattern that’s being repeated every day across Brazil.
The country’s laboratories have a bottleneck of tens of thousands of tests. They just don’t have the capacity at the moment.
As of 15 April, the health ministry had reported 1,736 deaths and more than 28,000 cases.
But Dr Carolina Lazari, medical chief of the molecular biology laboratory at Latin America’s biggest hospital, Hospital das Clínicas, says “the ministry numbers are a photograph of the past”.
Source:Fiilafmonline/BBC
