Race to dig graves in Brazil’s ‘Gateway to Amazon’ as Covid-19 death rate soars
- Hospitals run out of beds and life-giving oxygen in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million
- Brazil’s Covid-19 response ranked the worst in world, according to new research
With more than 3,000 burials in January alone, the Amazon rainforest city of Manaus does not remember a deadlier month.
Its cemetery is expanding at breakneck speed as bulldozers dig dozens of graves daily to accommodate the influx of victims of Brazil’s deadly second wave of Covid-19, possibly fuelled by new, more infectious virus variants.
Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s northern Amazonas state, has been hit hard by the pandemic’s resurgence.
The city of some 2.2 million has seen its hospitals run out of beds and life-giving oxygen with which to treat the stricken.
About three-quarters of the city’s dead end up at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery, near the banks of the Rio Negro, where workers brave the oppressive tropical sun in top-to-toe protective plastic gear to clear land for new graves.
To save space, they are also erecting dozens of vertical, concrete crypts, each able to hold 48 coffins or urns stacked over four tiers. These will hold up to 3,000 bodies.