Saner counsel need of the hour regarding to bury or not to bury COVID-19 victims
There is an ongoing debate without any scientific foundation but based on religious beliefs that COVID-19 patients who die should be allowed to be buried if the relatives so wish and not be cremated as per the gazette notification issued by the Minister of Health.
The decision to cremate obviously was taken as we didn’t know anything much about this new coronavirus at the time of its appearance. Today we are more knowledgeable about it. One argument that was put forward was that the water tables in the cemeteries are quite high and there is a great chance that the body fluids can get mixed with the ground water which would slowly seep into the drinking water resources.
The water table being high is known to me as I was the Chief Medical Officer of Health in Colombo and the cemeteries were under my administration. The Madampitiya cemetery had this issue when it rained as the water table rose and pushed up the coffins and sometimes bodies. In one area it is almost impossible to bury even now as the water gets collected and we had to re-allocate space in other areas for these bodies. The Borella Kanatte is a filled marshy land and even now a few acres near the Golf Links need filling if we ever plan to use that area.
So why are we worried about the body fluids getting mixed with the ground water? Even before China confirmed the first known case of COVID-19, the virus has been in the water in many countries. Water samples taken in Milan and Turin had shown genetic virus traces of the novel coronavirus on December 18, 2019. Chinese officials confirmed the first cases at the end of December. Italy’s first case was found only in mid-February although the virus had been in the water months before. French scientists carrying out investigations showed that a patient treated for suspected pneumonia near Paris on December 27, 2019 actually had the coronavirus. But the first recognized patient was found much later.
Sewage water samples from the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil had been found to contain traces of the virus, the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) of Brazil had announced. This finding was two months earlier than the first official confirmed case of COVID19 in the Americas and much earlier than the first reported case in Brazil at the end of February 2020.
Professor Davey Jones of Bangor University in the UK has gone on record saying that wastewater can tell us where the next outbreak will be. PCR tests were done to find traces of SARS-CoV-2 in untreated wastewater for disease surveillance. Similar research is being conducted in Barcelona, Spain at the university. They reported the presence of the virus in samples taken as early as January 15, 2020, 41 days before Barcelona’s first known case was reported on February 25, 2020. Most surprisingly, they reported the presence of two genetic fragments of COVID-19 virus in a sample taken on March 12, 2019 and that is eight months before the first human infections in Wuhan, China, in November to December of 2019!
All these reports show that the virus could be in the waters and may survive too. Newer studies show that the virus can survive on surfaces for up to 30 days. If we bury the bodies of COVID-19 victims there is a chance that our water table will get contaminated by the virus especially during the rains. Who knows the virus could get mutated or change its structure and come out as an entirely different virus and cause another type of pandemic. Let saner counsel prevail.
Dr. Pradeep Kariyawasam
Former CMOH/CMC