Cemetery Employees Work Overtime in Bergamo

I reported a couple of days ago on the situation in the northern Italian province of Bergamo, in Lombardy. Bergamo lies at the epicenter of the Wuhan Coronavirus crisis in Italy, and the crematoria and cemeteries are currently strained by a death rate that is normally seen only in wartime.

Below is the latest news from the cemetery in Bergamo. Many thanks to FouseSquawk for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

00:01   We were able, in normal times, to do on average 1300-1400 services a year.
00:07   But here it has become 500 in 15 days.
00:10   We are in a situation in which today
00:13   we are doing a burial every 30 minutes,
00:16   almost the numbers of war.
00:20   We are suffering all the consequences.
00:24   We have been here since Sunday with two teams, one arriving from Trento, and one from Verona,
00:27   as long as our colleagues from Bergamo have the need.
00:33   They are not numbers, they are all people. They are…
00:39   mothers, grandfathers, fathers, friends.
00:51   Bergamo is the province hardest hit by the coronavirus.
00:57   More than 300 people have died only in the past week.
01:02   The teams that have to do funerals are leaving every afternoon.
01:06   They are all needed today? —Yes.
01:10   Unfortunately, we have 25 funerals today,
01:13   13 just this afternoon.
01:17   Several of our workers have gotten sick; others are afraid.
01:26   We have stopped responding to every call for the moment
01:34   when we arrived at 400 and more in 12 days,
01:40   and we have the usual 45-50 persons a day whom we know personally, so…
01:48   so every hour we have at least 10 calls to manage.
01:51   Funeral tributes have also arrived from outside the region.
01:54   We have been here since Sunday with two teams, one arriving from Trento, and one from Verona,
01:57   as long as the colleagues from Bergamo need to be supported in order to succeed
02:04   in confronting the work of these days due to the presence of the coronavirus in this area.
02:09   In the end, it is we who have to take care of the families, we who have to take care of the bodies
02:15   to whom we need to give a dignified burial, and it takes time.
02:20   We are in a situation in which today we are doing a burial every half hour.
02:24   Almost the numbers of war — The crematory oven is in continuous use;
02:27   therefore it is almost impossible to have a calculable number
02:32   of the coffins in the cemetery.
02:35   We know that in a normal day, 8-10 people die.
02:39   Yesterday there were 61 dead.
02:44   The army has had to carry dozens of bodies out of Bergamo for cremation.
02:55   The cremations are carried out at Modena and Bologna.
03:07   I continue to say numbers even though they are not numbers, they are all people,
03:14   They are mothers, grandfathers,
03:21   fathers, friends, uncles of all the people who call us,
03:28   Whom they don’t see maybe, for days or for weeks,
03:32   because from the moment they enter the hospitals, you don’t see them again,
03:37   and you can’t see them even when they die to say goodbye to them,
03:44   to realize what has truly happened, because you saw them last when they were still well,
03:49   and when they were still responding, and you couldn’t say “Ciao” to them.
03:58   We have requested the prefect, the region, civil protection be included as a category
04:04   to have these Dpi [masks, gloves, protective suits], knowing full well that
04:08   at this moment not even medical personnel have them,
04:11   therefore they are a priority, because they have to save lives,
04:14   because if they succeed in saving lives,
04:17   we don’t have to — not even relatives, nobody — confront other deceased,
04:24   other deaths; nobody would have imagined something like this.
04:31   I am thinking of a family. They asked me to pass under their balcony
04:38   because they are in quarantine, to see the casket pass,
04:41   because if not, they cannot, because…
04:44   to give them at least a goodbye from the balcony, to be able to say “Ciao” to them.
04:50   I could at least do this for them.
04:56   From Benincasa, Biazzo, Falzone, Giancristofaro.
 

5 thoughts on “Cemetery Employees Work Overtime in Bergamo

  1. I’ve read elsewhere that Lombardy is home to 1M+ Han Chinese who work in the factories producing the fashion industry’s “Made in Italy” products. Like their brethren in the homeland, they’re filthy and will not change their ways regardless of the medical threat. So they die. If the press had any [manly appurtenances], they would report this fact more widely instead of avoiding it so as not to appear “racist.” It’s not racist to point out the fact that these people are dying because they’re too nasty and stupid to clean up and take some basic precautions. They wonder why Africans and westerners aren’t affected? Maybe it’s because not even an empty-headed African will sit there and hack in his family’s face or spit all over everything. And most people in the world don’t eat boiled bat [orifices] and hog lungs like the Chinese. THAT’S why they’re dying: they’re nasty.

  2. . [machine translation]
    SWEDEN. The Karolinska hospital leases containers for a thousand corpses

    Published March 22, 2020

    DOMESTIC.
    While schools are kept open as usual and the Public Health Authority lets their councils stay at “wash their hands” and the like, preparing for health care for the consequences – which is expected to be a disaster. Outside the infection clinic in Huddinge are now rented refrigeration and freezer containers that can hold almost a thousand deceased corona patients, data for Fria Tider shows today.

    “Part of the planning for an extra ordinary location,” writes the Stockholm Press Service in an email.

    It is outside Karolinska Hospital in Huddinge that the region has now set up rented refrigeration and freezer containers in close proximity to the facility’s infection clinic.

    The containers are normally used for food and have been hired from a supplier of equipment for major fairs and events. But the event industry is currently uphill and now the Stockholm region has found a new area of ​​use for the containers.

    According to a source within the hospital, the hired freezing facility should be used to store deceased corona patients at Karolinska Hospital. With a total interior volume of 200 cubic meters, the six containers provide enough space to wrap close to a thousand dead if needed.

    The source states that the staff are now given instructions to put deceased corona patients in double bins before placing them in the containers, due to the risk of infection in the handling of the bodies. At the same time, the business has been allocated a “very large” amount of corrugated bags, according to the source.

    In the Swedish hospitals’ brothels, it is usually about as cold as in a refrigerator, around 5 plus degrees. But several of the containers in Huddinge were set to freezing temperature during the night: Sunday: -22 degrees. This may indicate that the region expects long-term storage in the containers to be necessary when capacity is being strained at Stockholm’s burial offices and crematoriums or when the burial may be delayed in the event that the Stockholm population is quarantined or similar.

    “It is true that Region Stockholm, Regional Special Healthcare Management, as part of the planning for covid-19, for an extra ordinary location, has ordered extra storage capacity in refrigerated containers. These are currently located at Karolinska University Hospital Huddinge” writes an official at the Stockholm Press Service in an email to Free Times, without answering our questions about capacity etc.

    According to documents that Fria Tider has taken note of, the home defense has since Friday increased the readiness in the metropolitan area to be deployed within six hours. In a written order to the soldiers who read Free Times, they are instructed to have their bags packed with protective mask and supplies in order to “maintain combat value for 24 hours”. At the same time, a group manager in the home defense says that preparations are being made for a possible decision to quarantine Stockholm, which the police are not expected to be able to execute on their own.

    However, a quarantine of an Italian model is likely to require a parliamentary decision in Sweden, since the Infection Protection Act does not allow the government to place residents in entire cities with curfews.

    Stefan Löfven gave a “speech to the nation” at 21.15. However, the speech took place on the initiative of SVT and not the government. As expected, only buzzwords and no new measures are presented during the Prime Minister’s speech.

    The Home Guard has since Friday increased the readiness for a possible decision to quarantine Stockholm, according to information to Fria Tider.

    • My sympathies. I had a couple of pints of draught bitter last Weds; maybe a while before the next (unlike lager, it doesn’t take well to bottling).

  3. They live in this area of Bergamo , lots of them , so they work in garment industry, fake “ Made in Italy “ , then on January 26 Chinese New Year they went to China , many of them to Wuhan province where all this [ordure] started , and they comeback to Italy with this virus , , so that’s why it’s so bad infected ..

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