Italians trapped at home with their loved ones' bodies amid coronavirus lockdown

[Recursion]

Holy crap

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/12/coronavirus-bodies-italy-quarantine/

When his sister died after contracting the novel coronavirus, Luca Franzese thought that things couldn’t get much worse.

Then, for more than 36 hours, the Italian actor and mixed martial arts trainer was trapped at home with Teresa Franzese’s decaying body, unable to find a funeral home that would bury her.

“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” Franzese said in a Facebook video over the weekend, pleading for help. “I cannot give her the honor she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.”

In Italy, which has the second-highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world, 827 deaths have been attributed to covid-19. The government has taken extraordinary measures to contain the pandemic, restricting the movements of nearly 16 million people as the entire country has gone on lockdown.

[getagrip_already]

1. hmm, guess it's time to teach my kids....

how to build a funeral pyre. We have plenty of wood. Ground is a bit rocky, so they may have trouble digging a hole.

[Coventina]

4. Got any quicklime?

I don't mind dying myself, but I hate to think of my husband being in such a position.

[Siwsan]

2. That truly is a nightmare scenario

One doesn't want to make jokes about things like this but it did flash me back to that bring out your dead scene in 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. However, that's pretty much the old school solution to a 'plague'. Sometimes you have to give up on the social and emotional respect you feel is due to the dead, for the sake of the living.

[smirkymonkey]

3. How sad.

I feel very sorry for him and anyone else in his situation. It must be horrible. I really hope we don't start having that situation repeating itself here.

[dalton99a]

5. "A woman was quarantined alongside the body of her dead husband"

The video, which had been viewed about 9.5 million times by Thursday, got the attention that Franzese was seeking. On Monday morning, a local funeral home finally agreed to take Teresa’s body, sending a crew outfitted in masks, goggles and hazmat suits to collect her corpse.

No family members were able to attend the funeral. Pasquale Pernice, one of the workers at Aprea Funeral Home, told Al Jazeera the experience had been “surreal.”

Efi Campania, the association representing funeral home directors in the area, told local reporters that the delay in collecting Teresa’s body was due to administrative hurdles, not any reluctance on their part. “Our heartfelt and sincere condolences to the Franzese family,” the group said in a statement.

But the same situation appears to have played out elsewhere. The Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata news agency reported Wednesday that prosecutors in the province of Savona were opening a probe into an incident where funeral homes refused to transport the body of an elderly woman who died on Feb. 29 after contracting coronavirus.

Yet another disturbing scenario played out this week when a woman was quarantined alongside the body of her dead husband. Giancarlo Canepa, the mayor of Borghetto Santo Spirito in northern Italy, told CNN that the man died at 2 a.m. Monday, but that nobody would be allowed to remove his body until Wednesday morning.

The man, who has not been publicly identified, tested positive for coronavirus before he died, but refused to be taken to the hospital, Canepa told CNN. After he passed away, quarantine measures prevented anyone from entering the house and collecting his body.

The decision prompted an uproar, with neighbors telling television news station IVG.it that it was painful to know that the grieving widow was alone with her deceased husband’s body. The woman had been standing on her balcony and crying for help, they said, and the man’s relatives were desperately pleading for someone to interfere.

After telling CNN on Tuesday that there was nothing they could do, authorities removed the man’s body that same morning. IVG.it reported officials had been waiting for further testing to be completed. But given the circumstances, officials agreed that the corpse should be transferred to a morgue instead.

[LiberalLoner]

6. Unbelievably horrible. My DH is reading a book about the Plague

And I can’t help but think, although the mortality rate is obviously much lower, the spread of this virus is similar.

[Roland99]

7. Never thought the "Bring Out Yer Dead" scene from Holy Grail would actually be seen in today's world