Trapped at home with loved ones’ bodies
Authorities in Italy avoiding corpses
When his sister died after contracting the novel coronavirus, Luca Franzese thought that things couldn’t get much worse.
Then, for more than 36 hours, the Italian actor and mixed martial arts trainer was trapped at home with Teresa Franzese’s body, unable to find a funeral home that would bury her.
“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” Franzese said in a Facebook video over the weekend, pleading for help. “I cannot give her the honour she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.”
In Italy, which has the second- highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world, 827 deaths have been attributed to COVID-19. The government has taken extraordinary measures to contain the pandemic, restricting the movements of nearly 16 million people as the entire country has gone on lockdown.
But attempts to slow the spread of the disease have led to unintended consequences, including several instances where funeral homes reportedly refused to collect the bodies of those infected with the virus.
According to Al Jazeera, Teresa Franzese, 47, suffered from epilepsy but was healthy up until last week, when she began showing symptoms of the coronavirus. She died on Saturday evening, in her Naples home.
In a series of videos posted to Facebook the following afternoon, Luca Franzese said that his sister had been tested for the virus only after her death. The results came back positive, and he and several other relatives were placed under quarantine. That left a dilemma: What to do with Teresa’s body?
After various authorities failed to come up with an answer, Franzese said, the city of Naples finally referred him to a funeral home. But the funeral home refused, telling him it wasn’t equipped to deal with the situation.
“It was the first case in
Italy in which a person with the virus dies at home, so there was some confusion on what to do,” Francesco Emilio Borrelli, a local councillor who also serves as a member of Campania’s Regional Health Commission, told Al Jazeera.
On Sunday evening, Franzese posted an emotional appeal to his followers on Facebook, urging them to take the virus seriously as he stood in the same room where his sister lay dead in the background.
“We are ruined,” he said. “Italy has abandoned us.”
The video, which had been viewed about 9.5 million times by Thursday, got the attention that Franzese was seeking. On Monday morning, a local funeral home agreed to take Teresa’s body, sending a crew outfitted in masks, goggles and haz- mat suits to collect her corpse.
Yet another disturbing scenario played out this week when a woman was quarantined alongside the body of her dead husband. Giancarlo Canepa, the mayor of Borghetto Santo Spirito in northern Italy, told CNN that the man died at 2 a.m. Monday, but that nobody would be allowed to remove his body until Wednesday morning.
The man, who has not been identified publicly, tested positive for coronavirus before he died, but refused to be taken to the hospital, Canepa told CNN. After he passed away, quarantine measures prevented anyone from entering the house and collecting his body.
The decision prompted an uproar, with neighbours telling television news station IVG. it that it was painful to know that the grieving widow was alone with her deceased husband’s body. The woman had been standing on her balcony and crying for help, they said, and the man’s relatives were desperately pleading for someone to interfere.
“We are treated worse than garbage,” a family member told IVG.IT.
After telling CNN on Tuesday that there was nothing they could do, authorities removed the man’s body that same morning. IVG. it reported that officials had been waiting for further testing to be completed. But given the circumstances, officials agreed that his corpse should be transferred to a morgue instead.