Ecuador has been ordering thousands of pressed cardboard coffins to help deal with the corpses of coronavirus victims that have been left rotting in the streets of Guayaquil, its second-largest city.
The city has already gotten a donation of 2,000 of the caskets and has been ordering more to help with its overwhelmed cemeteries, reports the New York Post, quoting Agence France Presse.
The city, which has a population of more than 2 million, will also get refrigerated trailers to help store corpses, and Ecuador President Lenin Moreno is also planning a "special camp" to bury the 3,500 people he believes will die from COVID-19.
"There are either no coffins in the city or they are extremely expensive," a city hall spokesman told AFP.
Guayaquil's Mayor Cynthia Viteri, who is also infected with the disease, tweeted, even though the coffins are made of cardboard, they will still help provide a more dignified burial. She has attacked the government for the corpses being left in the street and has also ordered refrigerated containers at public hospitals, so bodies can be preserved until they can be buried.
Ecuador has recorded 191 deaths and 3,747 confirmed infections as of Monday afternoon, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Moreno, though, says the death toll is actually much higher, as authorities have been picking up more than 100 bodies a day.
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