Virus stigma drives families to abandon dead relatives

FAMILIES in Pakistan are abandoning dead relatives who have tested positive for Covid-19 due to stigma around the coronavirus, doctors and police say.

Officials across the country said families were refusing to collect bodies from hospitals, or deserting them in their homes. Efforts to tackle the pandemic are being hampered by public suspicion and resentment at precautions. Rumours include allegations that hospitals are being paid for each dead body, that the disease is a foreign conspiracy, and that anyone going to hospital gets an injection of poison.

Strict precautions for funerals have led many to believe that victims are at their most infectious after death. People also fear being forced into government quarantine centres where they will be mistreated, or of being ostracised from their communities.

Police in Ferozwala, in Punjab, said they had been called to a house where they found the body of a retired professor, Zahee Ahmed Zaheer, who had died of the disease and had been left by his family for fear of contracting the virus or being forced into quarantine. A youth in Dharampura hid in his room after he started showing symptoms and his neighbours turned on his family. He was later found dead.

Dr Zahoor Islam, a medic in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said: “People are more afraid of dead bodies than alive Covid-19 patients.” Cases have spiked after restrictions were recently eased, with more than 1,800 deaths.