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In the bustling Amazonian city of Manaus in Brazil, so many people died in a few days in the coronavirus pandemic that coffins had to be stacked on top of each other in long trenches hastily dug in a city cemetery. Some desperate family members reluctantly chose to cremate their loved ones to avoid burying them in these common graves.
Now, with Brazil emerging as the epicenter of the Latin American coronavirus with more than 6,000 deaths, even coffins are running out in Manaus. The national funeral association has called for urgent air transportation of coffins from Sao Paulo, 2,777 km (1,677 miles) away, because Manaus has no paved roads connecting it to the rest of the country.
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The city, populated by some two million people and carved out of the jungle, has been overwhelmed by death, in part because it is the main site where people from remote Amazon communities can obtain medical services, according to Lourival Panhozzi, president of the Brazilian Association of Funeral Service Providers.
As of April 30, the Brazilian Health Ministry said there were more than 5,200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state of Amazonas and 425 deaths, although there is concern that inadequate testing for the virus has meant that the numbers are much higher.
Before the outbreak, the city of Manaus, the state capital, had an average of 20 to 35 deaths per day, according to the mayor. Now, he registers at least 130 a day, according to data from the state secretary of health.
People in the region have also largely ignored the isolation measures.
There are also signs in the much larger cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo that suggest that authorities may not be able to handle a large increase in the death toll. Since then a field of fresh graves has been filled that far-right President Jair Bolsonaro dismissed in April.
The bleakest scenes in Latin America occurred last month in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil, where residents said they had to leave bodies on the street after morgues, cemeteries and funeral homes were overwhelmed.
Many in Brazil fear that the increasing deaths affect more favelas, the vast neighborhoods of the poor that are known in Rio and Sao Paulo, but that also exist in most of the large Brazilian cities and even in the smallest.
“There is great fear that uncontrolled contamination will occur there,” said Panhozzi, whose group represents the 13,400 private funeral companies in Brazil.
In the Complexo do Alemao de Río group of favelas, the body of Luiz Carlos da Rocha, 36, remained intact for more than 12 hours on Tuesday. Family members did not know why he died, but said he had epilepsy.
Relatives who attended the burial of a person suspected of having died of COVID-19 disease, in the Vila Formosa cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil. [Andre Penner/AP Photo] [Daylife]
The state military police, which normally collect bodies outside, no longer do so for non-violent deaths, an official at the scene said, who did not give his name. He said without elaborating that the change in policy was due to the coronavirus. The military police press office did not respond to requests for comment.
The next day, in the Río Salgado Filho Hospital, in a lower middle class neighborhood, Clovis de Castro, whose sick sister, Genina, had just died, found herself helping in the hospital morgue. He waited six hours to sort out the death certificate paperwork in what he described as a chaotic scene in the morgue, with grieving family members who came to identify bodies and only one worker available to move bodies. At one point, he was asked to lend a hand.
“He had to help a person put a body in a coffin,” de Castro said, adding that the experience made him “realize that people need help, the hospital needs help, the country needs help.”
De Castro left with a death certificate that said the cause of his sister’s death was undetermined. He was angry that no autopsy was performed that could have confirmed his suspicion that she died of COVID-19 or complications of the disease.
“Why hide these things?” I ask.
Sao Paulo director of ambulance services, Francis Fuji, blamed a recent increase in home deaths on coronavirus patients who were discharged from hospitals with mild symptoms, only to have their conditions deteriorate rapidly.
Paramedics don’t have the training to identify COVID-19 as a cause of death, he said, and many family members have lied about the symptoms of their loved ones to prevent corpses from being handled as if they were contagious.
“They think that if they get that diagnosis, their loved one will be removed in a sealed plastic bag, they will never see him again and they won’t even have a funeral,” Fuji said.
Sao Paulo authorities dug hundreds of graves last month in anticipation of an increase in deaths. President Bolsonaro has compared the coronavirus to “a little flu” and insists that radical state measures to close all but the essential businesses are more damaging than the disease. On April 2, he asked if the Associated Press news agency photos of the new graves were “fake news” or “sensationalism.”
By Thursday, all of those graves were full of dead, as were dozens of new ones, according to images from the AP photographer who took the original photos and revisited the site in eastern Sao Paulo. Trucks refrigerated to contain overflowing bodies are now seen outside hospitals and cemeteries.
In Manaus on Thursday morning, Raimundo Costa do Nascimento, 86, died of pneumonia at his home. The funeral workers were so overwhelmed that their relatives had to wait 10 hours for someone to retrieve her body.
A week after Panhozzi’s association appealed for the coffins for Manaus, he said the request is still being considered.
“That will not work,” he said. “I need it now.”
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