More than 1,700 Mexican health workers are officially known to have died of COVID-19 and they’re being honored with three days of national mourning on these Days of the Dead.
One is Dr. Jose Luis Linares, who attended to patients at a private clinic in a poor neighborhood in Mexico City, usually charging about 30 pesos (roughly $1.50) a consultation.
“I told him, ‘Luis, don’t go to work.’ But he told me, ‘then who is going to see those poor people,'” said his widow, Dr. María del Rosario Martínez. She said he had taken precautions against the disease because of lungs damaged by an earlier illness.
Her Day of the Dead altar this year includes — in addition to the usual marigolds and paper cutouts — little skeleton figures shown doing consultations or surgeries in honor of colleagues who have died.
Amnesty International said last month that Mexico had lost more medical professionals to the coronavirus than any other nation.