Ukraine has dug up mass graves in Dnipro, a city in the southeastern part of the country, as part of its preparedness plans for burying potential coronavirus victims.
Bulldozers have been working overtime in the public cemeteries in Dnipro to dig up over 600 graves. The government also has ordered thousands of body bags.
The city authorities said they not only wanted to be prepared in advance but also wanted to warn the residents of the city, which has over one million people living there, to observe the mandatory quarantine.
The measures were put in place as many citizens still continue to break the lockdown and have been on the playgrounds or public parks without any protective gear such as the face masks.
Dnipro in total has 12 cemeteries and no crematoriums, the authorities said adding that over 600 were dug but "they are going to increase the number," the TV news service TSN reported.
The grim measures were put in place by the local city authorities based on the feedback they received from their counterparts in Italy and Spain, where the novel Coronavirus (COVID 19) has killed hundreds and infected thousands.
"Mass deaths from the coronavirus have resulted in difficulties with the burial of the dead there," the officials told a Ukrainian news source.
The number of those dying at one point so hight that the army had to be called in to collect dead bodies from homes and hospitals. There has been a widespread shortage of burial grounds.
In Italy, there have been 17,669 deaths from the coronavirus and 139,422 confirmed cases. In Spain, as per the latest updates, a total of 15,238 have died of COVID 19, while 152,446 have been infected by the deadly coronavirus as of March 9.
The number of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in Ukraine was 1,892 as of April 9 and several cities in the country have been put under lockdown.
"According to the Public Health Center, there were to 1,892 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ukraine as of 09:30 Kyiv time on April 9," Ukraine's Health Ministry said on Facebook in its morning update on April 9. Of them, 224 cases were reported in the past 24 hours.
There is no coronavirus related data available from Russia-occupied areas – the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the city of Sevastopol, parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
