Italy's Mass Graves Are Opened but COVID Dead Can't Rest in Peace
At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, people were buried in haste as bodies piled up. Now families are fighting to recover the remains, but it may take years.
Barbie Latza Nadeau
Correspondent-At-Large
Published Jun. 14, 2020 4:45AM ET
ROME—In the back corner of Milan’s Maggiore cemetery is Campo 87, a field of hastily dug graves where 128 victims of COVID-19 were laid to rest in plots marked only with cheap plastic crosses. Those buried there were unclaimed at hospital morgues much like the scores of nameless COVID-19 victims buried in the potter’s field of New York’s Hart Island. But many of those who ended up in Milan’s Campo 87 were not interred there because they were homeless or had no families. In most cases, their family members were also COVID-19 positive and sick themselves, or under strict quarantine and unable to collect the bodies.
Now that the worst of the pandemic has subsided—at least for the moment—those same family members want to give their dead a proper funeral and transfer them to family tombs where they can pay their respects. But an archaic Italian law that dates back to past plagues prohibits anyone who dies from an infectious disease from being exhumed within two years of the burial, meaning the families have to wait even longer for the closure they need.
Because of the contagiousness of the coronavirus, none of those who died from it were embalmed or processed in accordance with normal burial practices. “It was more like a war situation where people were buried in mass graves,” a spokesman for the Maggiore cemetery told The Daily Beast. “At the time it was the only solution to avoid having bodies stacked up.”
Under normal circumstances, families in Italy have 30 days to claim the bodies of people who die in hospitals. After that they are catalogued and buried in communal sections in public cemeteries. Many of these grave sites across Italy are traditionally filled with unnamed migrants who died while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea or in refugee camps. Homeless people and foreigners without family are also among the dead. It is rare that Italians with families end up in these graves.
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Yet, though we have more COVID and more deaths than any other country, we have a significant proportion of "deniers" who believe this is all a "hoax" and on a national governmental level have a seeming policy of denial as well.
To the people of Italy and elsewhere, whose suffering should have given us the headstart to avoid the worse.
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