After the burials in Barranquilla were endorsed for the cases of deaths by COVID-19, given the increase in deaths, the cemeteries have had to work at full speed to meet the demand.
Currently there are between 12 and 15 burials per day that are carried out in the Calancala Catholic Cemetery. The average before the health emergency was a maximum of 6.
To date, the churchyard has a capacity, between graves and vaults, for around 300 burials. Should the death toll continue to rise, the cemetery administration plans to open more graves and vaults within the same lot.
Protocol
Within their biosecurity protocol they have implemented using only the vaults that are in level 2.
“What we are looking for is that the cylinder where the burial is made is at the same level as the funeral car so that those who do the process have the least possible contact with the coffin. When we exhaust that level we will use level 1, at ground level, ”explained José Franco, cemetery operations coordinator.
He added that the staff of the holy field follows strict sanitary measures to comply with the demands that the national government has imposed for the handling of corpses.
Cold room
A cold room with capacity for about 50 coffins was installed in the Universal Cemetery, in the face of a possible lack of availability of vaults.
The Secretary of Social Management of the District, Santiago Vásquez, explained that this alternative is part of an agreement to bury corpses that was made with the cemetery, which will benefit people in a condition of social abandonment.
“The coffins would be installed there temporarily while the cemetery has the capacity to do the burials, but it has not yet been used, this was done preventively so that in an emergency the bodies can be preserved.”
This cemetery has reinforced its logistics plant and works 24 hours to receive corpses, before they only did so at a certain time.
He indicated that in case of increasing the number of deceased, as in the Calancala, the Universal has availability to enable more vaults as exhumations are made.
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