For four days, Gerardo Ibarra’s lifeless body lay in the living room of his home in Ecuador’s sweltering coastal city of Guayaquil, a new epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak that may have already claimed hundreds of lives there and is raising alarms about the spread of the deadly pathogen across Latin America.
Before he died last week, Mr. Ibarra’s family rushed him to a hospital after he developed trouble breathing, concerned he had the Covid-19 disease caused by the novel coronavirus. A doctor turned him away, telling the family they didn’t have space for the 72-year-old retiree. After he died at home, the family couldn’t find anyone to pick up the corpse because emergency services and funeral homes were overwhelmed. So Mr. Ibarra’s corpse remained at home.
President Lenin Moreno said Thursday that although official statistics show about 100 people have died and 3,163 were infected with the virus, he was sure there were “tens of thousands of infected people and hundreds of lives cut short.” He added that in Guayaquil, a coastal city of 2.3 million, the number of bodies from pandemic victims being picked up every day had gone from 30 a few days ago to about 150 currently.
Men carry a sick man into a hospital in Guayaquil on April 1.
Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty ImageIn the surrounding lowland province of Guayas, whose capital is Guayaquil, the death count could reach as high as 3,500, Mr. Moreno said, leading officials to build a special cemetery to bury the dead. If that count is accurate, that means the outbreak in Ecuador surpasses any country in Latin America. Brazil so far has the highest count of confirmed cases at 8,066 with 327 dead.
The scenes in Guayaquil are from a horror movie. Families in the city wander from hospital to hospital carrying sick relatives. Private clinics are full and few are tested for the coronavirus, while some doctors stay home with infected relatives. With morgues full and residents fearful of contracting the virus, families have begun leaving the deceased outside their homes and on street corners.
“It’s a war zone,” said Enrique Boloña Gilbert, a doctor in a private hospital that is currently full with nearly 40 coronavirus patients.
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Experts warn that Latin American and other developing nations are especially vulnerable from the coronavirus due to poor public-health facilities and deep economic inequality, which makes it virtually impossible for impoverished people who depend on a daily wage to stay home to slow the virus’s spread.
“Ecuador could be a movie of what could happen in other countries in the region,” said Pablo Arosemena, a prominent businessman who is president of Guayaquil’s business chamber. “The impact of the coronavirus has been five times stronger than an earthquake.”
Guayaquil Mayor Cynthia Viteri, who tested positive for the virus, said in a video news conference Thursday that the illness has exploded in her city during school vacations that have been extended through Easter. The virus, she said, entered with residents returning in February and March from vacations in Europe, including the first known case, a 70-year-old woman who traveled from Spain and has since died.
About 70% of Ecuador’s coronavirus cases are in Guayas, according to health officials. The province has more cases than the total amount in most other Latin American countries.
Desperate videos have circulated on social media, including one of what appears to be a corpse wrapped in a sheet being burned on a Guayaquil street. The Wall Street Journal couldn’t verify the video’s authenticity, and Mr. Moreno said many are fake.
Relatives of a deceased person mourn outside a cemetery in Guayaquil on April 1.
Photo: marcos pin/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesThe coronavirus spread rapidly in Guayaquil as authorities say people didn’t stay home despite a government-ordered quarantine. Local officials held meetings in person, rather than virtually, infecting numerous local authorities, said Tathiana Moreno, who is leading the Red Cross’s response to the coronavirus in Ecuador. Other people continued to go to parties, she added. A lack of running water in poor communities, which makes washing hands difficult, is exacerbating the problem.
The virus hit Ecuador at a particularly vulnerable moment. Six months ago the Andean nation was in the throes of violent protests against the economic austerity measures implemented by the government as part of a $4.2 billion loan program with the International Monetary Fund. But while street demonstrations have faded, the pandemic has cornered the government once again into making tough decisions whether to spend limited resources on debt payments to foreign creditors or for an underfunded health system.
In Guayaquil, Mayor Viteri said she is diverting $10 million that had been earmarked for the city’s bicentennial festivities for health-care services. She said her office has purchased four 40-foot containers with refrigeration units, which it plans to place in front of hospitals for people to leave the dead.
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“They now have a place to take the cadavers,” Ms. Viteri said, “because the morgues have collapsed.”
A million dollars have already been spent on 25,000 new test kits set to be delivered from the U.K. next week, Ms. Viteri said. She added she’s also looking for a plot of land in Guayaquil for families to bury their dead.
That is little comfort for the family of Gerardo Ibarra. After health officials covered in white gowns picked up his corpse, Mr. Ibarra’s son, Victor, hauled out the family sofa to the street to burn, fearing it was contaminated. He later called fumigators to spray the house, concerned for his elderly mother. Now, he doesn’t expect to ever bury his father, believing his corpse will be lost among the many other bodies.
“There are a lot of dead,” he said. “We have to think of this like a combat, like my father died in battle and we are never going to see him again.”
—Kejal Vyas contributed to this article.
Write to Ryan Dube at ryan.dube@dowjones.com and José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com
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2020-04-03 15:19:55Z
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