Italy's Coronavirus Victims Face Death Alone, With Funerals Postponed (NYT)

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/world/europe/italy-coronavirus-funerals.html

Italy’s Coronavirus Victims Face Death Alone, With Funerals Postponed
As morgues are inundated, coffins pile up and mourners grieve in isolation: ‘‘This is the bitterest part.’’
By Jason Horowitz and Emma Bubola
March 16, 2020, 1:38 p.m. ET

ROME — At around midnight on Wednesday, Renzo Carlo Testa, 85, died from the coronavirus in a hospital in the northern Italian town of Bergamo. Five days later, his body was still sitting in a coffin, one of scores lined head-to-toe in the church of the local cemetery, which is itself closed to the public.

His wife of 50 years, Franca Stefanelli, would like to give him a proper funeral. But traditional funeral services are illegal throughout Italy now, part of the national restrictions against gatherings and going out that have been put in place to try to stem the spread of Europe’s worst outbreak of the coronavirus. In any case, she and her sons could not attend anyway, because they are themselves sick and in quarantine.

“It’s a strange thing,” Ms. Stefanelli, 70, said, struggling to explain what she was going through. “It’s not anger. It’s impotence in the face of this virus.”

The coronavirus epidemic raging through Italy has already left streets empty and shops shuttered as 60 million Italians are essentially under house arrest. There are the exhausted doctors and nurses toiling day and night to keep people alive. There are children hanging drawings of rainbows from their windows and families singing from their balconies.

But the ultimate metric of pandemics and plagues are the bodies they leave behind. In Italy, with the oldest population in Europe, the toll has been heavy, with more than 2,100 deaths, the most outside of China. On Monday alone, more than 300 people died.

And the bodies are piling up in the northern region of Lombardy, especially in the province of Bergamo. With 3,760 total cases reported on Monday, an increase of 344 cases from the day before, according to officials, it is at the center of the outbreak.

Hospital morgues there are inundated. Bergamo’s mayor, Giorgio Gori, issued an ordinance that closed the local cemetery this week for the first time since World War II, though he guaranteed that its mortuary would still accept coffins. Many of them had been sent to the Church of All Saints in Bergamo, located in the closed cemetery, where scores of waxed wooden coffins form a macabre line for cremations.

“Unfortunately, we don’t know where to put them,” said Brother Marco Bergamelli, one of the priests at the church. He said that with hundreds dying each day, and with each body taking more than an hour to cremate, there was an awful backlog. “It takes time and the dead are many.”

[Botany]

1. "And the bodies are piling up in the northern region of Lombardy, especially in the province ...

... of Bergamo."



And the experts say that America is going to be like Italy.

[lapfog_1]

2. Now, for all those that posted the Monty Python

"holy grail" scene "bring out your dead"

maybe take pause a bit... and think about that.

It's humor when you think "that's not us, cannot possibly happen to us, we are so beyond that".

And yet those dying of the black death in the 1300s were removed more rapidly that the dead piling up in Italy right now. Yes, not in the same numbers yet.

Not that funny now.

[BeckyDem]

3. This is too sad.

There are idiots here within the GOP framework telling people its ok to hug and be together. No kidding.