Inside a refrigerated shipping container are 17 plastic-wrapped corpses, each bearing a yellow label reading highly contagious.
The 12-meter steel box has been installed at the Johannesburg morgue to help it cope with a rising tide of Covid deaths.
The container can store up to 40 corpses, keeping them at a constant zero degrees Celsius. We have seen an increase of around 40 percent (in corpses) across the country, said spokesman Marius du Plessis of AVBOB, a leading funeral and burial service provider in the country.
South Africa is the continent s worst-hit country in the pandemic, with more than 1.4 million coronavirus cases and 40,800 deaths.