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Night burials at Latin America’s largest cemetery reveal deadly cost of coronavirus in Brazil
- In May, during the first onslaught of the pandemic, the Vila Formosa cemetery hired three excavators to dig 60 graves a day
- Now, there are six machines digging 200 graves a day, as Brazil sees vertiginous rise in Covid-19 deaths
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In almost three decades of working in Sao Paulo’s largest cemetery, the oldest gravediggers can’t remember performing more than 10 night burials.
But since the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic swept across Brazil, that exception has become the rule.
The vertiginous rise in deaths in Sao Paulo in recent months has forced the mayor of the country’s richest and most populous city to adapt funeral planning to avoid being overwhelmed.
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Now, in addition to hiring more personnel and vehicles, night shifts have been added in four of the 22 municipal cemeteries, where 600 graves are dug every day.
One of these is Vila Formosa, the largest cemetery in Latin America and a showcase for the lethal cost of the pandemic in Brazil, where more than 360,000 people have already died from Covid-19.
At 6pm the night shift clocks in. Two huge lamps powered by generators start up, illuminating the graves and filling the air with the smell of diesel.
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