Authorities in Ecuador’s largest city of Guayaquil are handing out emergency cardboard coffins and building two new cemeteries as they struggle to deal with the corpses of those killed by the coronavirus.

Bodies have been left to decompose inside homes in an area where temperatures regularly exceed 30 degrees as the city has become overwhelmed.

Some cadavers have even been abandoned on the city’s street corners.

“It’s already painful, but this is torture,” Carla Cobos, who lost her mother, told The Telegraph via phone.

Her mother, Cleotilde Montero, died of the virus on March 28, but exhausted hospital workers have yet to turn over the body to the family or a funeral home.

She believes it’s being held in one of four refrigerated trailers brought in by the government.

“They just say they’ll take care of the bodies themselves,” she said.

Videos posted online show family members wailing through gates with death certificates, pleading hospital and morgue workers for information about their family member’s body.

The port city of over two million has quickly become the hardest hit in South America. It could be a warning to its neighborus of the overwhelming devastation to come if the virus takes hold in the region’s densely packed urban areas.

Over the weekend the country’s Vice president, Otto Sonnenholzner, apologised for the “images that should have never happened,” after several photos circulated on social media showing bodies wrapped in plastic bags and discarded on sidewalks.