As virus swamps Peru, Venezuelan migrants collect the dead

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Faustino López was terrified after his wife, Angélica, was hospitalized with the coronavirus last month.

Deeply shaken by seeing her so seriously ill after 45 years of marriage, and worried about falling sick himself, López moved from their bed to the living room couch, and wept as he watched news of the pandemic spreading through Peru. Then he lost his sense of taste and began to shiver with fever. A test came back positive for the virus.

Depressed and fearful, López tried to check himself into a government center for coronavirus patients, according to his two children. A guard turned him away because he hadn’t been correctly referred.

The 68-year-old gardener went home, drank muriatic acid and hanged himself in his living room with a yellow extension cord.

López’s body remained there, the police afraid to touch it, until a gray Hyundai hearse pulled up. Jhoan Faneite and his stepson, Luis Zerpa, stepped out, wrapped in protective gear and toting a body bag and disinfectant.

Despite strict measures to control the coronavirus, this South American nation of 32 million people has become one of the countries worst hit by the COVID-19 disease. With more than 104,000 cases and 3,000 deaths, Peru was 12th in the world in numbers of confirmed diagnoses Wednesday, more than reported by China and just behind India.

The true scope of the disaster is even worse. With more than half of cases going uncounted, according to some doctors’ estimates, Peruvian officials call the coronavirus pandemic the most devastating to hit the country since 1492, when Europeans began bringing diseases like smallpox and measles to the Americas.

Peruvians are dying at home by the hundreds. In the capital, Lima, the grueling, dangerous work of recovering bodies from...