Virus Hot Spot Buys Freezers for Bodies and Plans a New Cemetery
With Deaths Surging, Ecuador Now Sees Toll Far Beyond Estimates
(Bloomberg) -- With government crews gathering up 150 corpses daily in southern Ecuador, President Lenin Moreno announced on Thursday that the death toll of coronavirus would soar far beyond anything official data so far has suggested.
Guayas province, which counts the sweltering port city of Guayaquil as its capital, has been the epicenter of the outbreak in Ecuador with more than 70% of the cases. The government’s emergency task force has seen fatalities rise five-fold in a week, Moreno said.
“We think there will be between 2,500 and 3,500 people who will die from COVID in these months in Guayas alone,” he said in a nationwide speech, pledging to continue to report the unvarnished truth. “Today we certainly have tens of thousands of contagions and hundreds of lives cut short by this virus.”
The president’s comments made clear that the official count is wildly off base since the last report showed Ecuador with 120 dead and 3,163 confirmed cases. Even those underreported figures show the small Latin American country of 17.5 million people trails only Brazil -- population 210 million -- in fatalities from the pandemic.
The mayor of Guayaquil, Cynthia Viteri, who spoke in a remote press conference on her Twitter account as she recovers from coronavirus, said the city will build a new cemetery to deal with the crisis and that freezer units have been acquired to store the corpses, many of which had remained in homes. Many people who died with reported respiratory problems weren’t tested and won’t be part of the official statistics, she said.
The World Bank separately said it will disburse $20 million in emergency funding to Ecuador to help equip intensive care units and supply other necessary medical supplies. Moreno said the government is acquiring more hospital beds and respirators and health workers, with hundreds of volunteers.
The country, which uses the U.S. dollar, is unable to print its way out of the crisis through greater spending and its bonds show a high probability of default trading at just 28 cents on the dollar. Next week, the government will submit an emergency economic bill to congress, Moreno said, “to guarantee that in several weeks we will be able to confront another face of the crisis, which is economic.”
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