Joseph Asitanga is the first person from his family to get formal education. When he was born in the Upper East regional town of Zebilla, his given name, Asitanga in his native Kusal language, is to signify the igneous rock- the type of rock named after the Greek word fire.

"It means courage. It means fearless. I do things no one wants or can do. When there is a problem, and I come around, everything changes," he said.

He heads the team of environmental health workers who bury people killed by Covid-19. He works in Accra. The epicentre of the pandemic in Ghana. More than half of deaths from the pandemic have happened here.

He and his team bury an average of 5 dead bodies now. At the pandemic's peak in 2020 and the beginning of 2021, they did twice that number.

Over a thousand Ghanaians have died from Covid-19 after more than a hundred thousand infections. In the panic of the pandemic when it first happened at the start of 2020 in Ghana, very little was known about the virus, and many health workers did not even want to go close to the infected persons they were supposed to treat.

The job that Asitanga and his men do is the most difficult in the chain of work on covid-19 treatment. Dead bodies are the most infectious.

Asitanga says the whole process of moving the body from the morgue and getting it into a hearse - a procedure that should usually be done in an average of 45 minutes for ordinary bodies - must not go beyond 10 minutes. 

To bury a dead body, he and his men and women must go through the strictest of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) procedures. They wear three different levels of PPE; a water-resistant apron, goggles, N95 mask and gloves and a face protection shield.

"Being in the PPE is tough. Sometimes is it so hot inside that some of the men dehydrate and pass out," he says.

They perform hand hygiene and ensure all tubes, drains and catheters on the dead body are removed. The body is then placed in a leak-proof plastic body bag. They decontaminate the exterior of the body bag with hypochlorite. Finally, the body bag is wrapped with a mortuary sheet or sheet provided by the family members who are not even allowed to come close to their loved ones.

"It is a painful thing to watch when the family members are prevented from their loved one," says Asitanga.

"The first Ghanaian Covid-19 patient we buried was a top-rated doctor. Everyone was scared even to go close to the body. Then, when we were preparing the body, it fell off, and some of our men were exposed to the infection. We were all panicking," he said while transporting his third body of the day on a Thursday afternoon to the Awudome cemetery. 

Ghana has seen two different waves of infections, and there is still uncertainty about the future even after a vaccine has been discovered for the virus. Joseph Asitanga wants his work to be a constant reminder that Covid-19 is real and kills.

"The whole of this area is made up of people killed by Covid. The whole area. Once you are brought here, it means you died from Covid," he says as he stretches his left hand towards the far end of the Awudome cemetery, the country's largest burial site for Covid patients.

Despite the work they do, they are underpaid and woefully under-resourced. The whole of the Accra metro, where Asitanga works, has no car to convey people and dead bodies to the cemetery. So instead, they fall on an old pickup meant for sanitation campaign to do their work. They sit in the pickup bucket and hang on to its top railings as they maze through the thick Accra traffic to morgues and burial sites. Asitanga himself, as leader of the team, uses his private car for burials.

"We don't have many things. I am not supposed to be using my car for this, but if I don't come, the bodies would be lying there," he says.

In August 2021, members of the Environmental Health Officers Alliance-Ghana (EHOA-GH), the body Asitanga belongs to, suspended the burial of Covid-19 infected corpses across the country, citing poor working conditions and lack of resources.

"It is not easy. Sometimes, I have to go against my association, so we don't have corpses pile up in the mortuaries. Sometimes the association will say don't bury. Asitanga will come and bury".

It seems part of Asitanga's life and growing up prepared him for this. Born in one of the poorest parts of Ghana in an area where getting an education was a privilege, he says he tried and failed many times before gaining admission to study an environmental health course.

"I was failed many times, eventually when I got employed as an environmental health worker, I was posted to the Upper West Region, and the boss there rejected me. So that's how I came back to Accra to work here," he said.

Today, he is an Environmental Health Analyst with a Masters degree in environmental health and sanitation, a degree in Environment and Natural Resources Management and a diploma in Environmental Health and Sanitation.

"People say they are afraid of this job. We all have dead relatives at the morgue. If we were all afraid, who will go a bury them?" he asked.