QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Daniel Larrea died Monday after a week of high fever, struggling to breathe and steadily turning blue. Then a new nightmare began for his family. No one in their city on Ecuador’s Pacific coast would pick up his body.
Many people there live below the line of poverty so they keep moving around working as one of them stated “I’d rather die from COVID than let my kids starve”.
Just heartbreaking …
Ecuador – that’s on the Equator. Not much seasonal change in temperature, a lot of high humidity.
I’d guess that doesn’t bode well for Donnie’s speculation that Covid could peter out with the warming weather. (Ed.)
I can’t even.
About 10 years ago at the facility where I work we had a tornado that took out the power–we have generators, but they don’t (or at least didn’t then) run the air conditioning. The funeral home couldn’t come pick up a body for a few hours because there were too many trees down. It got a bit ripe.
I can’t even imagine days and days of the smell of necrosis.
I was about to write the same thing. This pandemic is striking northern and southern hemispheres and the equatorial tropics all at the same time, so it doesn’t look like we’ll get any respite due to temperature or humidity.
I hope it doesn’t make it in to the Amazon and wipe out the indigenous people but that is most likely inevitable.
My son passed through Guayaquil 2/29 and again on 3/6. This is the first we’ve heard, and even though he’s basically been home since his school closed I’ve now got something specific to worry about,
I arrived in Quito on March 4. We were met at the airport by bomberos in hazmat suits who were checking everyones temperature and administering hand sanitizer. By the time I tried to leave on March 18, the airport was closed and all flights were cancelled. By then, pretty much 100% of people in Quito were wearing masks and half were also wearing gloves. Social distancing was being universally observed. All stores but grocery stores were closed and a curfew of 2 pm was being enforced. I managed to get out on an evacuation flight chartered by US State Dept. on March 26 to Miami. The measures being taken in the US were much less than in Ecuador, at least in Quito. I did not visit Guayaquil and so cannot comment on the conditions there.