LONDON – For more than a century, the family-run John Harris funeral home has buried people from London’s working-class East End. He says he has never seen death on the Covid-19 scale.
He gets 20 calls a day and has hired more staff to deal with. “My father, who is 92, was buried during the Blitz in the 1940s,” when German bombers razed much of the area, said Mr. Harris. “He has not experienced this death rate.”
The outbreak here is a clear warning to the US and others about what lies ahead if more contagious variants of the new coronavirus – like the one sweeping through this densely populated and ethnically mixed community – emerge.
In the East End neighborhood of Barking and Dagenham earlier this month, an estimated one in 16 residents was infected with Covid-19. The local hospital in nearby Romford rationed oxygen because the beds were too short. It recently passed a grim milestone: more than 1,100 patients died from the virus.
The local government has four cars driving through the streets with megaphones blaring the words ‘Coronavirus kills’. Religious leaders have agreed to stop providing personal services in an effort to stop the spread of the pathogen.