PAPUA New Guinea carried out the first in a series of mass Covid-19 burials today, interring 54 people whose remains have been unclaimed for months, as the pandemic ravaged the under-resourced Melanesian nation.

Hospital and government officials ordered the crisis ceremony after 300 bodies piled up at the morgue of Port Moresby General Hospital, overwhelming a facility designed to hold just 60.

Some remains have been stored there since March, as authorities tried to locate loved ones and secure scarce funding to carry out the last rites.

The ceremony took place at Nine Mile Cemetery on the outskirts of capital Port Moresby.

Masked-up officials carefully removed the sheet-clad remains from shipping containers and placed each in a rough wooden box made by local villagers, reported AFP correspondents at the scene.

From there, the makeshift caskets – some with names scrawled on the lids – were stacked like Jenga blocks in a 4m-deep trench.

Around 40 people looked on, including a handful of city hall staff, as well as hospital and morgue attendants and a few journalists.

No families were present.

Funerals are a vital cultural rite in Papua New Guinea, where ceremonies known as “Haus Krais” can span days.

The ceremonies will be attended by hundreds if not thousands of mourners, even in remote areas.

Families, extended clans and often people from neighbouring villages gather to weep, howl and chant for hours on end in a collective show of grief.

Of the 300 deceased at the morgue of Port Moresby General Hospital, around 122 were confirmed positive for the coronavirus.

However, testing is patchy and the scale of the pandemic crisis is not reflected in official figures in the country.

Officially, Papua New Guinea has detected about 35,000 Covid-19 cases in a population of close to nine million.

But data from 700 clinics around the country showed that 2.6 million people – more than a quarter of the population – were presented with flu or pneumonia-like symptoms between March last year and September this year. – AFP, December 8, 2021.