Bodies left in the street as Ecuador faces its reckoning
Authorities in Ecuador’s largest city of Guayaquil are handing out emergency cardboard coffins and building two new cemeteries as they struggle to deal with the corpses of those killed by coronavirus.
Bodies have been left to decompose inside homes in an area where temperatures regularly exceed 30C (86F) as the city has become overwhelmed.
Some cadavers have even been abandoned on street corners.
“It’s already painful, but this is torture,” Carla Cobos, who lost her mother, told The Daily Telegraph.
Her mother, Cleotilde Montero, died of the virus on March 28, but hospital workers have yet to turn over the body to the family or a funeral home.
She believes it is being held in one of four refrigerated trailers brought in by the government.
“They just say they’ll take care of the bodies themselves,” she said.
Videos posted online show family members wailing through gates with death certificates, pleading hospital and morgue workers for information about their family member’s body.
The port city of more than two million people has quickly become the hardest hit in South America.
It could be a warning to its neighbours of the overwhelming devastation to come if the virus takes hold in the region’s densely packed urban areas.
Over the weekend, Ecuador’s vice-president, Otto Sonnenholzner, apologised for the “images that should have never happened,” after several photographs circulated on social media showing bodies wrapped in plastic bags and discarded on pavements. “We’ve suffered a serious deterioration in our international image … and as a public servant, I ask for forgiveness,” he said during a national broadcast.
According to the health ministry’s latest figures, 3,995 Ecuadoreans have tested positive for the virus, with 2,708 of them in the coastal province of Guayas where Guayaquil is the capital. Of the 220 deaths nationwide, 138 have occurred in the province. By contrast, only 50 have died in neighbouring Colombia, a country with nearly three times the population. The real total could be even higher according to President Lenin Moreno, who says that city officials normally attend to 30 deaths each day. Recently that number has reached 150 a day. “We know that the official number of confirmed cases and deaths are coming up short,” Mr Moreno said in a recent address. “We need transparency.” Although the country was among the first to order social distancing and close schools in the region, some medical experts believe officials lagged in setting up controls at the airports.
“People were coming back to the country in February and March and they should have received information about staying at home, which they didn’t,” said Dr Esteban Ortiz, a public health expert, from Quito, the capital.
He believes traditions on the coast of throwing family parties to welcome travellers home after foreign trips may have contributed to the spread.
Dr Ortiz added that there were also problems in medical care. “People who need ventilators don’t get them and they die,” he said.
The situation is likely to get worse. Officials in Guayaquil believe the death toll could hit 3,500 in the next few months.
Cynthia Viteri, the mayor, who has tested positive for the virus, has ordered the reopening of an old hospital building to attend to noncoronavirus patients. Another convention centre will attend to patients with non-life threatening symptoms. Some medical staff will be allotted hotel rooms to avoid contact with their families.
Based on the experience in Guayaquil, other large cities in the region should “prepare for the bodies”, according to Dr Ortiz.
“My suggestion would be to organise a network of funeral homes, and educate them,” he said, referring to the reluctance by some in the city to handle coronavirus bodies.
If not, many other families could face what Carla Cobos calls a “traumatic odyssey”. She is now considering paying a bribe at the morgue where she believes her mother’s remains are being held.
“I’ve heard some are charging 10 to 100 dollars just for confirmation that the body is there,” she said.
Guayas, which has a population of 4 million, has more cases than Mexico, home to 125 million people. Ecuador ranks fourth for confirmed cases in Latin America. Brazil, the largest country, has the most cases and deaths, but there is widespread concern across the region that the numbers are significantly distorted due to poor record keeping.
Yesterday, more than 200 public health experts and epidemiologists called for a drastic increase in coronavirus testing in Latin America and the Caribbean in an open letter.