LONDON: For more than a century, John Harris’ family-run funeral home has buried people from London’s working-class East End. He says he has never seen death on the scale worked by Covid-19.
He has received 20 calls a day and has hired more staff to deal with it. “My father, who is 92, was doing burials during the Blitz in the 1940s,” when German bombers flattened much of the area, Harris said. “He didn’t experience that level of mortality.”
The outbreak here offers a strong warning to the United States and others about what is reserved for it if more contagious variants of the new coronavirus are applied, such as the one that runs through this densely populated and ethnically mixed community.
In the Barking and Dagenham district of the East End, earlier this month, it was estimated that one in 16 residents was infected with Covid-19. The nearby Romford Hospital hospital rationed oxygen while the beds fell short. It recently surpassed a terrible milestone: more than 1,100 patients died from the virus.
The local government has four cars crossing the streets with megaphones ringing the words “Coronavirus kills”. Religious leaders have agreed to stop doing face-to-face services in an effort to curb the spread of the pathogen.