Army trucks pull dozens of coffins from Bergamo to incinerate

A long column of military trucks passed through central Bergamo in northern Italy on Wednesday night, transporting dozens of coffins of victims of the coronavirus for cremation elsewhere, because the city's cemetery no longer has capacity. .

The image of the impressive olive-green caravan, collected by the Italian media, is an example of how the epidemic is hitting the province of Bergamo, the most affected within Lombardy, with about 55 daily deaths from the disease.

The coffins, placed in some thirty Army trucks, passed through the city on their way from the local cemetery to the highway, destined for a dozen municipalities in Italy.

The cemetery can no longer manage the emergency and the wait for cremations is over a week.

According to the local newspaper L'Eco di Bergamo, military vehicles took out nearly sixty coffins to incinerate the remains at facilities in various municipalities that have offered to do so.

Half of them have been taken to the city of Modena, in whose cemetery the cremations will be carried out, according to the agreement reached with the Prefecture and the health authorities.

Other bodies of the victims of this epidemic in Bergamo have been transferred to the municipalities of Acqui Terme, Brescia, Cervignando del Friuli, Parma, Piacenza, Rimini, among others.

Once the cremations are carried out, the ashes will be transferred back to Bergamo, to the place of origin of the deceased.

The Mayor of Bergamo, Giorgio Gori, thanked the towns that are collaborating in this sad management of the emergency.

"In a tragic moment, your collaboration and closeness are commendable," wrote the mayor, who noted that the local cemetery cannot manage the high number of cremations, since most of the families of the deceased have chosen this modality.

Italy approached 3,000 deaths with the coronavirus yesterday, after registering 475 more in just one day, and the positive cases are almost 29,000.

The balance is dramatic in Lombardy, where in the last 24 hours there were 319 more deaths, up to 1,959, and the total number of positives is 12,266, with almost a thousand people in intensive care, and within this region Bergamo is the most affected.