I’ve been reading about the challenges Michigan is experiencing with the Covid-19 outbreak, including a nurses’ walkout over understaffing, and the picture is just horrifying. Yet it is a cakewalk compared to what is going on in Guayaquil, Ecuador. In that coastal city, they’ve run out of coffins so the Dole banana company is crafting coffins out of cardboard. Students returning from Spain and Italy seem to have started the spread of infection, but now it is decimating the poor and destitute.

The official numbers don’t look bad compared to what we’re seeing in New York City, but I wouldn’t put any stock in their statistics since they don’t have the wherewithal to do much testing or keep accurate records.

Ecuador has 3,163 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Nearly 71 percent are in the province of Guayas, where Guayaquil is located. The port city of about 2.2 million people is dealing with 1,520 confirmed cases of coronavirus. That’s more than in seven Latin American countries: Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Paraguay.

At least 120 people have died of COVID-19 in Ecuador, according to the country’s emergency management agency.

The reality is a lot starker.

Since the start of the crisis in late March, the government has recovered 1,350 bodies from Guayaquil’s homes, according to the office of Jorge Wated, who heads the task force responsible for picking up the dead in the city. About 60 bodies are collected daily, his office said…

…By the time the virus found its way to the slums, the dynamic had reversed. While better-off Ecuadoreans were able to stock up on provisions and retreat to their homes, many manual workers have defied the government’s stay-at-home orders to make ends meet.

Residents of poor neighborhoods say many of their neighbors continue to work every day, increasing the risk of contagion. Some are going door to door, begging for food.

Banks turned into high-risk areas once Ecuadoreans, many without bank accounts, showed up in large numbers to retrieve their $60 stipend in cash.

“There are colleagues who continue going out every day because they are the only breadwinners,” said Lenny Quiroz, the Guayaquil-based head of Ecuador’s union of house cleaners. “People are being left without money, without food.”

The fact that the virus is running rampant in an equatorial country like Ecuador is a bad sign for anyone who thinks the contagion will ebb with warmer weather in the north. This was confirmed on Wednesday in a paper issued by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

In the paper, the National Academies’ Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats said that the number of well-controlled studies showing reduced survival of the coronavirus in elevated temperatures and humidity is small and urged caution not to over-interpret these results because of varied and questionable data quality.

Even if warmth were unfavorable for COVID-19, “given the lack of host immunity globally, this reduction in transmission efficiency may not lead to a significant reduction in disease spread without the concomitant adoption of major public health interventions,” they wrote. “Given that countries currently in ‘summer’ climates, such as Australia and Iran, are experiencing rapid virus spread, a decrease in cases with increases in humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed.”

They added that neither the coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) nor the flu strains of previous pandemics have shown a seasonal pattern.

“There have been 10 influenza pandemics in the past 250-plus years—two started in the northern hemisphere winter, three in the spring, two in the summer and three in the fall,” they said. “All had a peak second wave approximately six months after emergence of the virus in the human population, regardless of when the initial introduction occurred.”

I don’t think there’s much hope of things returning to some semblance of normality until a vaccine is found, approved, and administered to enough people to create herd immunity. In my home state of Pennsylvania, the governor just cancelled the rest of the school year. This is a source of sadness for us, but it’s a wise decision.

The worst part is knowing that this thing just isn’t going to get better in the near future.