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The General Cemetery of Santiago is digging thousands of graves to face an increase in deaths due to the new coronavirus pandemic, aggravated in the country.
Until last week, Chile registered between 350 and 500 new infections daily, but on Saturday it began to give balances around 1,000 until it shot up on Wednesday 60%, when 2,660 infections were registered in a single day, and almost the same number this Thursday.
A month ago, staff excavated 2,000 individual tombs in three courtyards of the gigantic municipal precinct, located in the Recoleta district, the cemetery director, Rashid Saud, confirmed to AFP.
“We realize the historical moment we are in and that we may need more graves, because we see what has happened in nearby countries,” said Saud.
He added that a month ago and on their own initiative they began the task of providing more graves.
Although every year the cemetery staff clears the temporary graves not claimed by the relatives, in an activity colloquially called “hangovers”, the task was never done at this time of year, Luis Yévenes told AFP, secretary of the General Cemetery union and president of the Federation of Municipal Cemetery Workers.
According to Saud, nearly 1,000 graves have been enabled so far. Yévenes affirmed, however, that some 1,700 of yards 134, 134 and 136 have already been cleared.
The official plan is to enable nearly 2,000 graves, according to Saud, to deal with the pandemic that has killed 368 people in Chile since the first case of coronavirus was registered on March 3.
“We have to contrast it with other countries that have resorted to mass graves, with countries where they have been with the dead in the streets, corpses rotting in trucks; that is what we want to avoid and hopefully we will not use them (the new graves)”, Saud added.
For his part, Yévenes explained that these are earth graves that are being excavated in patios where bodies were buried more than a decade ago. Gravediggers work there Monday through Saturday.
He also expressed his concern about what happens in the municipal cemeteries of other cities in Chile, such as Valparaíso and Viña del Mar and Concepción and Talcahuano, in the south. “There is no capacity. We made a cadastre,” said the leader.
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