Uncollected bodies lie for days in the streets of Guayaquil, Ecuador, the emerging epicenter of the coronavirus in Latin America
Anthony Faiola, Ana Vanessa Herrero 6 hrs ago
7-8 minutes
The body was wrapped in a plastic tarp, swollen, already attracting flies. He had been a neighbor, a man Rosangelys Valdiviezo passed while walking home from work, though they’d never exchanged words.
Now he lay in front of his home, one of an untold number of bodies cast out in the streets of Guayaquil, Ecuador, a sweltering South American city being ravaged by the novel coronavirus. Valdiviezo, a 30-year old seafood worker, said the body had lain out in the tropical heat for six days.
“I am very afraid,” Valdiviezo, a Venezuelan migrant who moved to Guayaquil, said by telephone. “I’m terrified of dying so far from home.”
Ecuador’s largest city, a commercial center of nearly 3 million, is emerging as the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak in Latin America. In local news accounts, videos shared on social media and telephone interviews, officials, aid workers and others in the poverty-stricken metropolis are reporting fly-covered bodies on sidewalks and corpses left inside homes for days.
Ecuador confirmed its first case of covid-19 on Valentine’s Day: A 71-year-old Ecuadoran woman who arrived in Guayaquil after a visit to Spain. Since then, the crisis has ballooned, jumping to more than 2,200 cases, or roughly 70 percent of Ecuador’s total, far surpassing the numbers in Quito, the capital.
The outbreak has struck faster than Guayaquil can cope. Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed. Mortuary workers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, collect the bodies — some dead from the virus, some apparently from other causes — from homes. With daytime temperatures topping 90 degrees in a city where many live with no air conditioning, some grieving families saw little option but to carry days-old corpses outside.
© Stringer/Reuters A woman is helped to enter the emergency room of Guasmo Sur General Hospital in Guayaquil on Wednesday.
The city’s struggle echoes those of
other hard-hit spots around the globe where corpse control has become a grim daily struggle.
The Italian army has mobilized to haul cadavers out of devastated Bergamo after the crematorium there was overwhelmed. Authorities in Iran have dug mass graves. The Spanish military found elderly patients in care homes abandoned and dead in their beds.
Guayaquil could be a harbinger of things to come as the pandemic reachers more deeply into the
ill-prepared developing world.
“The situation is dire in Guayaquil at this moment,” said Tati Bertolucci, CARE’s director for Latin America and the Caribbean. “There are dead bodies in the streets, and the health system is collapsed, so not everybody who has symptoms can get tested or treatment.”
A joint military-police operation has been recovering around 30 bodies per day, according to Jorge Wated, coordinator of a government task force assigned to cope with the crisis. A strict citywide curfew was complicating efforts by mortuary workers and funeral homes to remove bodies, Wated said in a nationally televised address this week.
“We recognize any errors and ask for forgiveness from those who have had to wait to remove their loved ones,” Wated said on Twitter. But he also braced locals for worse — warning that the death toll could reach 3,500 dead in the Guayaquil region alone.
“Everything depends on you, on your discipline,” he said. He urged the citizens of the city to adhere to a lockdown and curfew.
Analysts say several factors have contributed to the outsized impact of the coronavirus on Guayaquil. It’s an international port city. Some impoverished workers there initially put their need to continue earning a living ahead of calls for social distancing.
“The lockdowns were less effective in Guayaquil,” said Sebastian Hurtado, head of the Ecuadoran political consultancy Profitas. “In other parts of the country, more people complied. In Guayaquil, you also have areas with no basic services, really small housing units and denser living.”
Dump trucks have poured gallons of soapy water on city streets as part of a sanitation effort. The city’s mayor, Cynthia Viteri, told reporters in a Facebook news conference Thursday that shipping containers had been placed at hospitals to store cadavers.
Viteri has confirmed that she, too, has caught the virus.