GRAVES, COFFINS in short supply in Brazil.
RIO DE JANEIRO — In Brazil’s bustling Amazon city of Manaus, so many people have died within days in the coronavirus pandemic that coffins had to be stacked on top of one another in long trenches in a city cemetery. Some despairing relatives reluctantly chose cremation for loved ones to avoid burying them in those common graves.
Now, with Brazil emerging as Latin America’s coronavirus epicenter with more than 87,000 confirmed cases and 6,000 deaths, even the coffins are running out in Manaus. The national funeral home association has pleaded for an urgent airlift of coffins from Sao Paulo, 1,700 miles away, because Manaus has no paved roads connecting it to the rest of the country.
The city of about 2 million people carved from the jungle has been overwhelmed by death in part because it’s the main site where those from remote Amazon communities can get medical services, said Lourival Panhozzi, president of the Brazilian Association of Funeral Service Providers.
Before the outbreak, the city of Manaus, the capital of the state, was recording an average of 20-35 deaths a day, the mayor said. Now, it is recording at least 130 a day, data from the state’s health secretary show.
People in the region also have been widely ignoring isolation measures.
There also are signs in the much larger cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo that suggest authorities may not be able to handle a huge increase in the death toll. A field of fresh graves that was dismissed in April by President Jair Bolsonaro as excessive has since been filled.
Latin America’s grimmest scenes occurred last month in Ecuador’s city of Guayaquil, where residents said they had to leave bodies on the street after morgues, cemeteries and funeral homes were overwhelmed.
Many in Brazil fear the rising deaths will hit hardest in the favelas, the vast neighborhoods of the poor that are wellknown in Rio and Sao Paulo but which also exist in most big Brazilian cities and even in smaller ones.
“There is a great fear that uncontrolled contamination will happen there,” said Panhozzi, whose group represents Brazil’s 13,400 private funeral companies.
Sao Paulo’s director of ambulance services, Francis Fuji, blamed a recent surge of deaths in homes on coronavirus patients who were discharged from hospitals with mild symptoms, only to have their conditions deteriorate rapidly.
Paramedics don’t have the training to identify covid-19 as a cause of death, he said, and many relatives have lied about their loved ones’ symptoms to avoid the corpses being handled as though they were contagious.
“They think that if they get that diagnosis, then their loved one will be removed in a sealed plastic bag, they’ll never see him or her again, and they won’t even have a funeral,” Fuji said.
Authorities in Sao Paulo dug hundreds of graves last month in anticipation of a rise in deaths. Bolsonaro has likened the coronavirus to “a little flu” and insists that sweeping state measures to close all but essential business are more damaging than the illness. On April 2, he questioned whether photos by The Associated Press of the new graves were “fake news” or “sensationalism.”