Day 134: Every Earth is Fit for Burial

Today's title is by Marlowe, and the news that inspired it came from Brazil and Indonesia. Brazil, long #2 in case count, exceeded the UK in deaths just yesterday, 42,000 to 41,000. (The US is still #1 at 117,000.) Even though the US has a higher case rate (6,474 per million) than any European country bigger than Luxembourg, our death rate (355 per million) remains much lower than that of European hotspots like Belgium (833), the UK (614), Spain (580), Italy (567), Sweden (483), and France (450). PlagueBlog thinks the occasional COVID-19 survivor getting a huge hospital bill he'll never actually pay is a small price to pay for a non-socialized healthcare system that saves almost twice as many lives.

The AP makes hay of Vila Formosa, a São Paulo cemetery, digging up graves to make room for the rising body count. But moving bones into ossuaries after a period in the ground is a common Portuguese reburial practice, and by no means the apocalyptic outcome it sounds like in English. Coronavirus is actually calming down a bit in Brazil, leading to the usual hand-wringing over the reopening of the Brazilian economy.

Of more interest are the Indonesian body snatchers liberating the dead for Islamic burial. The New Straits Times carefully omits the religion involved, while going into great detail about security forces' various failed attempts to enforce quick burials of those dying of COVID-19. The UCA (Catholic) News is clearer about the Moslem motivation for the body snatchings, but also mentions that there's already a fatwa against such burials.

Back in the land of the living, China's case count has jumped from their usual see-no-evil trickle of cases to a cluster of 53 cases in Beijing. A whopping 46 of the 53 are asymptomatic; most have been traced as far as a wholesale vegetable market but no further. PlagueBlog would call it your usual sign of cryptic community spread in a country going out of its way not to test anymore, but surely China will eventually find some foreign visitor to pin it all on.

Massachusetts cases are up a third of a percent again today.