Covid-19 Is Trapping Ecuador Between Death and Debt
Latin America’s worst-hit virus victim also faces a deepening economic hole.
Guayaquil has run out of coffins.
Photographer: Francisco Macías/Getty Images South America
Sometime late last month the bodies began to turn up on the streets of Guayaquil. Some of the dead were abandoned in dumpsters. Others had been bundled in plastic and left on the sidewalks of this seaside Ecuadoran city, the yellow and black plastic cordon suggesting an unsolved crime scene.
While most of Latin America is bracing for the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Ecuador is already overwhelmed. The Andean nation of 17.5 million people is proportionately South America’s most afflicted: Only Brazil has a higher death count, with three times the fatalities for a population 12 times larger than Ecuador’s. (But as Bloomberg News reports, the continent is woefully behind in testing populations for the virus.) In Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, with 70% of the nation’s stricken, coffins are scarce, families wait days for funeral homes to collect their dead and morgues are overflowing, forcing city authorities to store the bodies in industrial refrigerators.