Last month, Guayaquil, a heavily occupied coastal city in the west portion of the state, made international news as corpses stacked up in households as well as at times, on the sidewalks, in what has been considered as one of the coronavirus epicenters in Latin America.

At least 1,300 citizens have died around the nation thus far, while 27,000 have also been infected; however, the figures are much higher for researchers to fear. More than 10,200 citizens died in the Guayas region last month, as per the Ecuadorian officials.

For Guayas, the current monthly figure is around 2,000 casualties. Whether or not many deaths were actually linked to the pandemic is unknown, since many people have died and been buried without being tested first.

To reporters who document the coronavirus outbreak, providing the news comes with the threats of life and death. Based on the rights groups, perhaps there is no area where this would be more evident than in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where at least twelve journalists died during most of the disease outbreak, and much more than twelve have become infected.

Cesar Ricaurte, the CEO of Fundamedios, a non-governmental organization promoting press freedom across the Americas, had this to say: "Most of the journalists are believed to have been infected while working. But you cannot be sure."

"There were journalists on the streets until the end of March," Ricaurte continued. "Then, we started seeing cases of infections and deaths, and the journalists stayed home. It was a kind of self-censorship. They were terrified and didn't have protective gear."

The casualties have sent shock waves across the globe, forcing many reporters on the streets to assess the dangers of documenting the outbreak.


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Corpses Piled in Bathrooms

Ecuador is among the first developing nations to experience such a severe outbreak in a pandemic one that has generally reached wealthy countries first.

In a matter of days, the authorities have mentioned that the number of deaths in Guayaquil rose dramatically and swiftly, overpowering an insufficient general healthcare system.

Front line doctors and nurses in one of the coronavirus epicenters in Latin America are raising the curtain on the everyday horrors they encounter in an Ecuadorian city where the medical system has crashed.

According to health staff, at one facility at Guayaquil overloaded by COVID-19 victims, there was a need for piling corpses in bathrooms since the mortuaries were full.

A 35-year-old nurse at the first facility speaking on the condition requesting anonymity claimed that he had been professionally and emotionally disturbed by the trauma of what he saw.

"The morgue staff wouldn't take any more, so many times we had to wrap up bodies and store them in the bathrooms," the nurse stated. The morgue came just to retrieve them once the corpses were stacked up to six or seven tall.

President Lenin Moreno has admitted that the accurate statistics "are short" of the reported coronavirus totals of Ecuador.

Guayas Province, capital of which is Guayaquil, reported 6,700 casualties in the first part of April, further than three times the monthly average. The discrepancy indicates that the true death toll of COVID-19 is much higher than the nationally reported count of less than 600.