Special issue introduction: burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19 Exception and rupture?

The year 2020 was marked by a pandemic that produced exceptional situations. Itmay still be too early for a comprehensive understanding of its implications, but withthis special issue ofHuman Remains and Violencewe seek to explore one particularphenomenon associated with the pandemic: the sudden surge in the number of deadbodies to be processed in the forensic and funerary systems in pandemic hotspots.Excess mortality rates give us an indication of proportion and of the challenge tothese systems. In various countries, excess mortality rates for 2020 reached peaks ofy to one hundred per cent1or even more.2These numbers are based on uncertainand highly uneven statistics, and, since they are national averages, it is reasonable toassume that the extra numbers of dead bodies to deal with in urban hotspots duringpeak times have been considerably higher. Numbers from New York conrm thisassumption. There the number of deaths in 2020 was four times the average overthe three preceding years.3A more ne-grained analysis, based on weekly numbersfrom Italian municipalities in March-April 2020, suggests that the number of peoplewho died in peak weeks in Bergamo was eight times higher than in previous years,surging from around 25 to close to 200 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per week.
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