GUATEMALA CITY – Guatemalan hospitals say they have had to bury dozens of unidentified COVID-19 victims, and a hospital is creating files in the hope that once the pandemic passes, those who have enjoyed will come for them.
Employees of one of the country’s largest public hospitals have begun photographing patients who arrive alone and are too unhealthy to give their private details. Those who die unidentified are placed in frame bags with transparent windows on their faces in case they arrive familiar in spite of everything.
Protocols that demand the immediate burial of the dead in a pandemic only make the scenario more difficult, officials say.
It has reported that more than 47,000 have shown infections and more than 1,800 deaths nationwide.
The first of the 63 unidentified dead at the hospital of San Juan de Dios, one of the most important in the capital, died on April 25. She was in her 20s and buried the same day.
Byron Fuentes, director of public cemetery management at the Ministry of Public Health, said no one had come to look at the 41 men and 22 women they had buried, known only as “XX.”
He declined to comment on how he treats unidentified dying people.
At Roosevelt Hospital, another of Guatemala’s biggest, Dr. Luis Chavez, who has a pathology index, said staff had tactics to help relatives identify the dead.
They began framing bags with windows in the hope that relatives arriving at any time before the funeral could identify someone, because for fitness reasons, the bags cannot be opened, Chávez said.
“A few weeks ago, we had the case of a user who arrived by taxi,” he said. “She’s a woman. She was admitted to the hospital and died. They took her to the morgue with the XX call. He said the hospital workers had violated the two-day waiting protocol and that, fortunately, relatives had arrived.”
They were shown a photo taken from the window of her purse and they met her, she said.
The hospital has begun a refrigerated trailer to involve the bodies if the parents cannot arrive within six hours that the protocols allow to claim a frame after death.
No hospital seems to merit a national identity database containing the fingerprints of anyone with a national identity document. A spokeswoman for the registry said that searching for the national registry of others would only be conceivable on the orders of a judge, prosecutors or forensic officials.
A death certificate noted through The Associated Press showed the user known as “XX XX, XX XX”, with sex and an estimated age. For the cause of death, he indexed acute respiratory distress syndrome and COVID-19.
For now, the unidentified victims of COVID-19 are buried in a designated domain at the back of the verbena cemetery in the capital. Surrounded by trees and near a colony of makeshift dwellings, the unadorned tombs are marked with a number.
For parents who may one day search for their loved ones, there is much to do.
Officials estimate an age, write down the sex and hospital they arrived at. Relatives provide data that matches those limited details, said Fuentes, the head of the cemeteries. Even then, confirmation would be complicated.
“The law states that when a user dies from a quarantined illness, he cannot be exhumed,” he said. “The same law gives us an exception, but it is in order to issue a judgment, the only one responsible would be to issue a sentence.”