South African coffin-maker saw COVID-19 at work and at home

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The coffin-maker knew death too well. The boxes were stacked in his echoing workshop like the prows of ships waiting for passengers. COVID-19 was turning his business upside down.

Then it moved into his home.

Casey Pillay’s wife was a midwife, delivering babies for coronavirus-positive mothers in Johannesburg, the epicenter of the pandemic in South Africa — once fifth in the world in number of cases — and on the continent.

That she would be infected, they knew, was a matter of time.

When she fell ill during the country’s surge in cases, she retreated to the main bedroom. Pillay withdrew to a bedroom next door. Scared, he barely slept, managing a few hours before dawn as his wife wrestled with some of the worst days of her life.

“I’d literally be on eggshells listening to what she was going through,” Pillay said Tuesday. “I would go in every now and then, fully kitted up, just to check vitals, whether she needed oxygen. When she recovered, we sat down and had a chat. She was really scared because at one stage she thought she was gonna die.”

It was a blessing in disguise, he said, to see someone with COVID-19 recover after so much exposure to death through his work.

Pillay, a manager at the coffin-making business, said about 10 colleagues also were infected. All are now OK. Their survival reflects the relatively low death toll from COVID-19 in South Africa, and in Africa in general, as the continent appears to defy dire predictions that the virus would cause massive numbers of deaths.

Life has edged back toward normal after a surge in infections in South Africa in June and July that threatened to overwhelm public hospitals. Many of the more than 1 million graves that Gauteng province, home of Johannesburg, once hurriedly mapped...