The Italian army is transporting coffins from Bergamo, northern Italy, to remote cremation sites because local crematorium and morgues can’t cope with the long waiting list for burials. Coffins were stacking up at hospital and cemetery morgues.
Under the country’s strict lockdown, many families have been unable to see their loved ones during treatment or to attend their funerals.
“I think it’s worse than a war,” Marta Testa, whose father died of the Wuhan pneumonia. “Dad is waiting to be buried. And we are here waiting to tell him goodbye.” Testa never saw her father again after he was taken to a hospital on March 7.
Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo, said that the number of coronavirus deaths may be far higher than reported: “There are significant numbers of people who have died but whose death hasn’t been attributed to the coronavirus because they died at home or in a nursing home and so they weren’t swabbed.”
