By The Associated Press
A portrait of Jose Valencia, a male nurse who died from symptoms related to COVID-19, placed on a Day of the Dead altar made by his daughter at their home in Mexico City, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2020. The weekend holiday isn't the same in a year so marked by death in a country where more than 90,000 people have died of COVID-19, many cremated rather than buried and with cemeteries forced to close. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)
MEXICO CITY —- Diminutive figures skeletons in facemasks and medical caps are all too common on Mexico’s Day of the Dead altars this year.
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 inlcudes — 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.
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