Teresa Padrón’s husband died in a Mexico City hospital on Tuesday but she has no idea where his body is.

Ángel Dorado Salinas, 52, passed away in the General Hospital of Mexico early Tuesday morning after he was admitted five days earlier for treatment of chronic kidney disease. However, doctors said that the cause of his death was possibly Covid-19 even though test results had not confirmed that to be the case.

Padrón arranged for her husband’s body to be sent to a funeral home but she soon found out that the hospital had mixed up Dorado’s cadaver with that of another man.

“The funeral home … told me that I couldn’t see my husband and that the coffin was going to leave the hospital sealed. … I said that was OK but I wanted to make certain that the body in the coffin was my husband,” she told the newspaper Milenio.

Before the coffin was sealed at the hospital, a funeral home employee sent Padrón a photo of the corpse and she quickly realized that it wasn’t her husband but that of another man of about the same age.

“If it wasn’t for the blessed funeral home, they would have sent us another person,” she said.

With no idea what happened to Dorado’s body, Padrón and about a dozen relatives went to the hospital to demand that it be delivered to them.

“Mayor [Claudia Sheinbaum]: we request your intervention so that the body of Ángel Dorado is delivered to us. No one knows where he is,” said one placard held up by a family member.

Padrón told Milenio on Wednesday that she received a call from a doctor at the hospital who told her that they needed more time to find out what had happened to her husband’s body. She said that the doctor told her that the influx of coronavirus patients is “a situation that caught us unprepared – it’s not a typical situation.”

Some of Dorado’s relatives said they believed that his body had been delivered to another family and already cremated.

The owner of a funeral home in Iztapalapa, the Mexico City borough with the highest number of Covid-19 cases, said that he has recently dealt with people who have expressed doubt about whether the body inside the coffin was really that of their loved one who succumbed to Covid-19.

“They can’t see it, hug it or anything” because of the continued risk of infection, Javier Lozano said. “All they can do is trust the hospitals and the health professionals.”

Source: Milenio (sp)