Missing Corpses: Families in Ecuador Are Searching for Dead Relatives
Families in Ecuador are now searching for the missing bodies of their deceased relatives from hospitals to morgues, according to a recently published article.
Dead Bodies Have Been Piling Up Everywhere In Ecuador
Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city, admitted that they were not able to prepare for the impact of COVID-19 on their healthcare system. Now, the corpses of COVID-19 patients can be found everywhere.
Recently, it was reported that dead bodies were abandoned in hospitals, left decomposed inside homes, and in some cases were wrapped in plastic and cardboard and were left on the streets.
A video also went viral after a woman begged the government to recover the body of her husband in her house. She cannot do what she needs to do because she is in quarantine. The government insisted that they will come to transport the body.
This time, the situation in Guayaquil is becoming worst. More families grieve not because they don't know where to have corpses of their dead relatives will be buried, but they cried because the dead bodies of their loved ones are missing.
Dead Bodies Are Now Missing
Arturo Ramos, whose father died due to COVID-19, shared his experience about searching for the body of his father, Flavio.
He said that he rushed his father to the hospital because Flavio was gasping and had lost consciousness. When they arrived at the hospital, the hospital staff told him the facility was already full.
The doctor informed him that there are no beds for patients. Arturo also said that if they were told that if they stay at the door, a guard will be called to kick them out of the hospital.
After four hours of searching for hospitals that would admit his father, he ended up in General Guasmo Sur Hospital. It was the eleventh hospital he tried. Arturo recounted that his father was in a room with two patients who were already dead.
On April 1 at around 9:30 in the morning, he stepped out of the hospital to have some breakfast. He said that he was just gone for 15 minutes and when he returned his father already died. He said: "No one was with him when he died."
When he returned a day after his father died, authorities told him that they could not find his father's corpse. Instead, he was told by the authorities to go the different morgues and try to locate through the unidentified remains himself.
He started searching for the remains of his father. He said: "[Inside the morgue] there were bodies stacked one on top of each other. Going into that room, it's like hell." He also added that dead bodies inside the morgue were separated by those who have been identified and those who had not.
He went into different morgues and had searched for roughly 250 corpses, but still, he had not found the remains of his father. Now, it's been almost a month, but still, his father's remains were not found. The worst, in his days of searching the missing corpse of his father, last week, he tested positive for the virus.
This is just one of the cases in Ecuador where bodies of dead people went missing. There are still others until now who are searching for the remains of their loved ones. To avoid infections as what happened to Arturo, the government created a website where relatives can search the names of the missing body of their loved ones.