Coronavirus: Amazon mayor asks Greta Thunberg for help as COVID-19 victims buried in mass graves
Hospitals, emergency services and cemeteries in the city of Manaus have been overwhelmed after it became a virus hotspot.
Monday 4 May 2020 09:23, UK
The mayor of a city on the Amazon river where coronavirus victims are being buried in mass graves has appealed to environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg for help.
Manaus, in Brazil's Amazonas region and in the heart of the rainforest, has become one of Brazil's COVID-19 hotspots, reporting 3,941 confirmed cases and 357 deaths by Friday.
A surge in fatalities during April as a result of the coronavirus outbreak has left hospitals, emergency responders and cemeteries overwhelmed.
It has led to bodies being put in mass graves with mechanical diggers being used to cover the corpses with earth.
Mayor of Manaus Arthur Virgílio Neto said in a video posted on Saturday: "My very dear Greta Ernman Thunberg... I'm telling you that we are needing help. We have to save the lives of the protectors of the forest.
"We are in front of a disaster, something like barbarism," he said.
At the time of writing, the Swedish teenager had not replied directly, but the same day she retweeted a post by Greenpeace warning that indigenous Amazon people were under greater threat during the .
The environmental activist called it "completely unacceptable".
In the video, which starts with the message: "SOS Manaus-AM, Save the Protectors", Mr Neto is filmed sitting at his desk, speaking in English.
The city, in northwestern Brazil, is home to about two million people, thousands of whom are indigenous people from the Amazon jungle.
During April, 2,435 deaths were registered at the city's public cemeteries, almost double the 2019 total. While hundreds of deaths have been put down to COVID-19, the actual figure is unknown.
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More than 6,700 people have officially died in Brazil after catching coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the pandemic.
There were 4,970 new cases of the virus and 421 deaths over the previous 24 hours, the health ministry said on Saturday, adding that the nation has now registered more than 95,000 confirmed cases of the virus and 6,750 deaths.
New cases increased roughly 5.4% on Saturday from the previous day, while deaths rose by roughly 6.7%.
In a sign of growing tensions, inmates in one of the city's prisons took seven guards hostage briefly on Saturday.
Ten guards and five prisoners suffered minor injuries in the disturbance, officials said, which relatives said was over poor conditions and that inmates also feared catching coronavirus.
Two other jails in the same state have had confirmed cases, according to local prison authorities.
Brazil's president, Jair Bolsanaro, has dismissed the pandemic as "a little flu" and refuses to wear a mask or practice social distancing.
Asked recently about Brazil's death rate surpassing China's, he gave this terse response: "So what? I mourn [the deaths] but what do you want me to do? My name is Messias but I can't work miracles."