(Dan Tri) – The number of people dying from Covid-19 at home in Myanmar has skyrocketed, causing a team of volunteers to collect bodies to work non-stop in recent days.
Volunteers bury Covid-19 victims in Mandalay city, Myanmar (Photo: AFP).
Every early morning, Than Than Soe’s phone vibrates with a series of requests for help from people whose relatives died of Covid-19 in Yangon city.
Than wrote the name, address, and contact number related to the victim in a notebook and then dispatched a team of volunteers to the dead person’s house to help collect the body.
`We operate teams without any time to rest. Every day, my team collects about 30-40 bodies. I think other volunteer teams do the same,` Than told AFP.
She also said: `Sometimes, there are two dead bodies in the same house.`
In Myanmar, most hospitals across the country are deserted, without doctors or patients, even though the epidemic situation in the Southeast Asian country is very complicated.
While doctors refuse to go to work, many people are determined not to go to hospitals operated by the military.
Sann Oo, who volunteered to work as a driver when the first wave of the epidemic hit Myanmar last year, said his typical work day now lasts 13 hours.
`Before that, we used to help take patients to the hospital. We would ask which hospital they wanted to go to. But now things are different when every time we receive calls, we will ask ‘will we go to the hospital?
Volunteers pray before the bodies of Covid-19 victims at a cemetery in Mandalay (Photo: AFP).
On July 17, Myanmar recorded 5,500 new Covid-19 cases, but experts say the actual number seems to be much higher.
At one victim’s home, Sann and his team loaded a body on a stretcher, covered it with a blanket and took it out into the street, to be loaded into a vehicle.
When they arrived at Kyi Su’s cremation ground, at least eight other ambulances were parked outside.
`Double crisis` in Myanmar
Since the coup, many doctors and medical staff have participated in the civil disobedience movement to protest against the military.
This development causes a `dual crisis` in Myanmar when both the political upheaval and Covid-19 are affecting people’s lives.
Volunteers take the body of a Covid-19 victim for cremation in Yangon (Photo: AFP).
Myanmar state media said over the weekend that the government is speeding up the search for oxygen supplies from neighboring Thailand and China.
The United Nations last week warned that Myanmar was at risk of becoming a `Covid-19 super-infected country`.
Than Than Soe said two members of her group tested positive for Covid-19 during the recent outbreak and one person died.
A man called his brother who was at the Kyi Su cremation ground – where their mother was about to be cremated – to tell him to wait a little longer, because an ambulance was about to take their father –
With Than, such heartbreaking stories have become normal.
`Sometimes, I don’t want to pick up the phone and don’t want to answer calls. It’s not that I don’t want to do my duty, but because I really feel too much sadness,` Than said.
