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Aerial view of a General Cemetery worker digging a grave in Santiago on May 14, 2020, amid the new coronavirus pandemic. – Health authorities ordered the General Cemetery of Santiago to enable more than 1,700 graves under the possibility of an increase in deaths from COVID-19. (Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI / AFP)
Thousands of new graves are being dug in the main cemetery in the Chilean capital amid a spike in COVID-19 cases in the South American country, authorities said Thursday.
Chile’s infection rate skyrocketed this week, prompting the government to declare a mandatory closure of Santiago’s seven million people as of Friday.
The country registered between 350 and 500 new infections per day until an increase in cases during the weekend. For Wednesday, 2,600 infections were recorded in a 24-hour period, with almost the same number on Thursday.
“We realize that this is a historic moment and that we may need more graves, because we see what happened in other countries,” the cemetery director Rashid Saud told AFP.
Gravediggers were preparing 2,000 fresh graves to deal with the pandemic that has so far claimed 368 lives in Chile since March 3.
“We have to contrast it with other countries that have resorted to mass graves, with countries that have had dead people on the streets and rotting corpses in trucks. That is what we want to avoid and we hope we don’t have to use them, ”Saud said of the new graves.
The head of the cemetery workers union, Luis Yevenes, said he was concerned about the situation in other Chilean cities, citing a “lack of capacity” in Valparaíso and Viña del Mar in the center, and the cities of Concepción and Talcahuano further afield. south. .
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