Peru hit especially hard — more cases than China
LIMA, Peru — Faustino Lopez was terrified after his wife, Angelica, was hospitalized with the coronavirus last month.
Deeply shaken by seeing her so seriously ill after 45 years of marriage, and worried about falling sick himself, Lopez moved from their bed to the living room couch, and wept as he watched news of the pandemic spreading through Peru. Then he lost his sense of taste and began to shiver with fever. A test came back positive for the virus.
Depressed and fearful, Lopez tried to check himself into a government center for coronavirus patients, according to his two children. A guard turned him away because he hadn’t been correctly referred.
The 68yearold gardener went home, drank muriatic acid and hanged himself in his living room with a yellow extension cord.
Lopez’s body remained there, the police afraid to touch it, until a gray Hyundai hearse pulled up. Jhoan Faneite and his stepson, Luis Zerpa, stepped out, wrapped in protective gear and toting a body bag and disinfectant.
Despite strict measures to control the coronavirus, this South American nation of 32 million people has become one of the countries worst hit by the COVID19 disease. With more than 104,000 cases and 3,000 deaths, Peru was 12th in the world in numbers of confirmed diagnoses Wednesday, more than reported by China and just behind India.
The true scope of the disaster is even worse. With more than half of cases going uncounted, according to some doctors’ estimates, Peruvian officials call the coronavirus pandemic the most devastating to hit the country since 1492, when Europeans began bringing diseases like smallpox and measles to the Americas.
Peruvians are dying at home by the hundreds. In the capital, Lima, the grueling, dangerous work of recovering bodies from homes falls to Faneite, Zerpa and fellow workers from the Piedrangel funeral home, who, clad in fullbody suits, face masks and goggles to protect themselves, collect as many as 10 bodies a day.
On this afternoon earlier this month, Zerpa began by stripping Lopez and washing down his body with disinfectant.
A week later, Lopez’s wife, Angelica, died of coronavirus in a hospital.
Peru’s government barred all nonessential movement and shuttered business on March 15, a lockdown currently scheduled to last until Sunday.
When soldiers and police stop the Piedrangel hearse to demand its travel permit, many recoil when informed it is carrying a likely COVID19 victim.
More than 5,000 police officers have been diagnosed with the disease, with 92 deaths, out of a force of roughly 100,000. The army has suffered lower levels of the disease.
Faneite says he has personally handled more than 400 COVID19 deaths since March.
When he returns home to his sleeping wife and two young children, Faneite undresses in silence, showers and washes his clothes with sodium hypochlorite disinfectant. Sometimes, he gargles with salt water.
”You have to take care of yourself,” he says. “Before they go, before the inevitable happens, I want see them again.”