Italy has mobilized its army to evacuate the corpses of victims of the new coronavirus in Bergamo, a city located in the heart of the main epidemic center in the country and whose funeral services are overwhelmed.
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Images filmed by residents of the Lombard city northeast of Milan and broadcast on the site of the local newspaper Eco di Bergamo show a long column of military vehicles circulating at night in the city streets and recovering coffins in the cemetery . An army spokesman confirmed on Thursday that 15 trucks and 50 soldiers had been deployed to transfer the bodies to neighboring provinces. Local authorities in Bergamo had previously appealed for help with the cremation of the bodies of the victims, the crematorium of the city being overwhelmed.
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Italy reported on Wednesday the largest daily increase in the number of deaths from the coronavirus with 475 additional deaths in a day, for a total of nearly 3,000 since the epidemic began in the country in late February after its outbreak in December in China. There were more than 300 additional deaths in Lombardy alone, where the province of Bergamo is located, the most affected with more than 4,000 cases of contamination.
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Italy has imposed containment on its population and, in the face of an ever-increasing toll, the President of the Council, Giuseppe Conte, said that these restrictions would be extended. The images of army trucks evacuating corpses illustrate the disruption that the Italian health system seems to be achieving, particularly in the northern regions of the country that have been the hardest hit.
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Giacomo Angeloni, head of the cemeteries in Bergamo, said this week that the city's crematorium was in continuous operation, cremating 24 bodies a day, almost twice the maximum usually expected, and that it could not keep up with this pace . As the morgues overflow, the benches in the crematorium chapel have been removed to make room, but more coffins are arriving every day. The Governor of Lombardy, Attilio Fontana, said that doctors and nurses in hospitals in the region were exhausted. " I am worried about the possibility that they may succumb physically and psychologically because if they succumb, it would really be a disaster, " Attilio Fontana told Radio Capital.
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