Letter to the Editor

Hi Cairns News, As the footage of the open air crematorium fires in India continues to circulate, I can’t help but wonder about a few things that absolutely do not make sense about that whole scenario. I live in the country and I regularly make burn piles out of all sorts of green waste. I would say I’m pretty experienced when it comes to building a decent bonfire. I’ve been observing the footage of the makeshift crematoriums in India, with piles and piles of burning wood everywhere, and a few things don’t make sense about what I’m seeing.

How long to burn 100,000 bodies and how much wood? India is using the inaccurate and unreliable Covid PCR test kit

Multiple funeral pyres of victims of COVID-19 burn at a ground that has been converted into a crematorium for mass cremation in New Delhi, India, Saturday, April 24, 2021. Indian authorities are scrambling to get medical oxygen to hospitals where COVID-19 patients are suffocating from low supplies. The effort Saturday comes as the country with the world’s worst coronavirus surge set a new global daily record of infections for the third straight day. The 346,786 infections over the past day brought India’s total past 16 million. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

For a start, the piles of wood don’t seem like they would be burning anywhere near hot enough, or long enough, to effectively cremate a fresh, wet, human body, full of juice. They would be having to add copious amounts of wood over a pretty lengthy period in order to reduce a fresh corpse to ash. It can be done, sure, but it would take a while. The piles of wood aren’t very large. Some of them barely seem large enough to cover a single human body. So are they burning each body individually like that?

That’s got to be a really inefficient way of doing things. The amount of fuel it would require would be immense. Also, there seems to be people walking around amongst the burning piles. Are they seriously walking around in the fumes of burning dead bodies? Dead bodies which are technically a bio-hazard? Bodies that died, due to a highly infectious, highly lethal virus? Is that how they dispose of what should be considered contaminated, potentially infectious, bio-hazardous waste?

With barely more PPE than a plastic face shield and what looks like basic surgical or cloth masks? Shouldn’t the bodies be going into some kind of closed incinerator with proper exhaust vents, if they died of such a nasty disease? Wouldn’t that be a bare minimum requirement, to ensure that any viral matter would be properly destroyed? The method of disposal seems incredibly inefficient.

Imagine the toxic pollution that would be creating. Shouldn’t they be ensuring that it is kept at a certain minimum temperature, for a certain minimum amount of time, in order to properly destroy any viral particles, and ensure the bodies are 100% cremated? It really is all for show, isn’t it. I can’t incinerate weed seeds on my property because it’s not a reliable enough method of disposal.

But they can just pile a bunch of wood on top of a dead body, which should be regarded as contaminated, potentially infectious, biohazardous waste? Now I’m just a country bumpkin but that right there, doesn’t add up whatsoever. You know how much trouble I’d get in if the local council thought I was disposing of pig carcasses like that? Yeah….

A Monck

Queensland