“We are overwhelmed!” Laments Ricardo Pereira as he flattens the earth among the ceaselessly dug graves on this plot of Lisbon’s largest cemetery, full of Covid-19 dead identified with a simple number.
“This lot is filled in 50 days, while it normally happens within a year”explains to AFP this 36-year-old gravedigger, who works at the Alto de Sao Joao cemetery, which overlooks the mouth of the Tagus.
The working day of his team of gravediggers begins with the funeral of two people without funds from a social center in Lisbon, allegedly affected by the pandemic, needs Fausto Caridade, responsible for that cemetery.
When the hearse arrived, no family member appeared, and the four cemetery workers carefully donned regulatory attire for the burial of the dead: a mask, blue gloves, and white protective gear covering them from head to toe. .
The two coffins are buried next to each other, while there are hardly any places available on this part of the cemetery, where the tombs are set apart only by a number, engraved on a small plate planted in the recently removed earth.
“Realize the reality”
In the central passage of this section, which was opened in late December to house mostly those killed by Covid-19, the garlands of flowers are piled up. Ahead, an orange excavator is about to resume its work to dig more graves.
“The people who come here must realize the reality,” laments Maria Joao Costa, who has come to bury her mother, who died of Covid at the age of 80.
“And that my mother received the first dose of the vaccine two weeks ago” In her nursing home, this emotionally dressed nurse tells, looking at the photo of her mother, which she holds between her years.
Since the beginning of the year, Portugal has registered an average of 180 deaths from the corona virus every day. Apart from the microstates, it is the sixth country in Europe and in the world with the worst balance in relation to its population.
With just over 1,500 deaths per million residents since the start of the pandemic, it was behind Italy but ahead of the United States or neighboring Spain.
Since locked up in mid-January, the country has seen new infections drop and the death toll has dropped to 100 a day, after a record of more than 300, but the rate of funerals remains very high.
Historical mortality
“There are many corpses in the morgue waiting to be buried”, explains the gravedigger Ricardo Pereira. And of the ten funerals planned for the day at Alto de Sao Joao Cemetery, the largest in the capital, half are victims of the pandemic.
In the main vein of the cemetery, set amid white mausoleums, is one of the three crematoria in the city that have been operating non-stop since the beginning of the year, from morning to night.
Normally, in a month of January, the number of cremations in Lisbon rises to a dozen per day. “They are currently working at their maximum capacity, with more than twenty” daily cremations, says Sara Gonçalves, head of the Lisbon Municipality responsible for the management of cemeteries.
The pandemic has caused an unprecedented spike in mortality in Portugal since the Spanish flu in 1920, with a total of 123,000 dead last year. About 16,000 deaths are attributed to the covid, more than half of them since the beginning of the year.