Trinidad and Tobago becoming like London during the great plague

THE EDITOR: When I was a teenager I was assigned a book to read. It was The Tower of London by William Harrison Ainsorth and was set in London in the mid-1600s.

It was about the great bubonic plague and the great fire of London (which, maybe, cleansed the plague?).

I recall the story describing how horse-drawn carts travelled the streets of London, with the "drivers" ringing a bell and calling out, "Bring out your dead!"

Corpses would be brought out of houses and tossed onto the carts to be dumped somewhere.

So why would my mind run on this today?

Because we, in our country, are becoming like London in the mid-1600s. We are setting up corpse-storage facilities to dump our corpses into because we have no room to place them.

Neighbourhoods where such facilities are being set up are complaining, for they do not want "containers" filled with corpses of people who died from our “plague” to be set up near their homes.

Imagine the interiors of those containers, even if chilled or frozen. What eventually will happen to the corpses? Will the current pace of death continue to outstrip our capability to properly treat with and bury all of our corpses?

And if not, what will we do? Bring in dozens, then more, freezer/containers to stuff with the growing number of corpses? But eventually what will we do? Thirty deaths a day are 900 deaths a month. How many corpses can fit into one container? And for how long can they stay there?

What can we do about this?

Surely a compulsory vaccination campaign will help tremendously but we have neither the intelligence nor strength to implement this totally.

How stupid can we continue to be? Really?

PETER O'CONNOR

via e-mail