And, through all this infection and grief, that family still had to prepare for a funeral in a hurry. That's because Iris Barillas had to be buried by COVID protocol, strict and unceremonious measures guided by the Ministry of Health. And Today in the wake of Barillas's death Cherisse Halsall shadowed the health care worker who had been given that task.

You've heard a lot about the plight of the frontline worker, the nurses, doctors, and lab technicians who have carried the burden of Belize's COVID-19 experience. But what about the health inspectors? Normally assigned to hand out food handlers licences and carry out inspections they've had to increase the surveillance portion of their duties. It's an essential job that encompasses contact tracing, procedural monitoring, and multiple check ins and today we got a first hand look at a day in their life when we tagged along with Senior Health Inspector Lisa Tillett Moyer.

Lisa Tillett Moyer, Senior Health Inspector, Belize District
"The first thing we do as we reach work in the morning to get to work we would normally get the data from last night, how many positive cases and what we have to do so what we do we enter them in the tablet. We share them among each other because today we have like 20, 19 , so we share them among ourselves, the other officers and we put them in the tablet. We call the positive cases you know we give a little bit of health education and then we ask how they're doing and we provide medication for them."

"Apart from that for today I've learnt of a COVID death and a suspect, you know one that we're not sure of and because we're not sure the public health is for us to always work as if we are dealing with everyone with COVID. We know in the country of Belize we have COVID all over so everybody is considered a COVID patient for us."

Cherisse Halsall:
"So let's talk about the confirmed COVID death, we saw you head to the hospital walk me through the procedures."

Lisa Tillett Moyer
"What I would normally do is once the call comes in that we have a COVID death then I would be the person that goes to the hospital and gets the death certificate and then we would work along with the undertaker who currently is Mr. David Coye, ensure that the boys are doing everything they're following the protocol that they showed. I provide them with my Sanitizer that I have personally in my hand to ensure that I sanitize them as they go through each one of the processes while the undertaker does his part so it's like a two way and a two person commitment to ensure that everybody is safe. The person will be buried so all I had to do was go to the morgue, ensure that the movement of the body is done in the proper way and everyone is safe while they're moving the body from the morgue into the casket."

And what about that suspected COVID death? Reliable reports are that it's an 18 month old child.

Lisa Tillett Moyer, Senior Health Inspector, Belize District
"The suspected COVID patient we have to be transferred out from the morgue this afternoon and so that's what we're waiting to get the call when they're ready."

At that point Tillett-Moyer will have to repeat this morning's process. And that's not the end of it because the afternoon was taken up with institutional visits.

Lisa Tillett Moyer, Senior Health Inspector, Belize District
"And this afternoon we have to do follow up on certain places like with the elderly, make sure they're all right make sure everything is okay there, we go to the children's home. We go to the police station to make sure that everybody is following the protocols that they should."

This evening we can tell you that that second death suspected to be caused by COVID-19 tested negative posthumously - so that suspect case was not a COVID case.

Iris Barillas, however, becomes the country's 5th COVID death and the first female to succumb to the disease. The 72 year old Barillas was a mother to four boys, three of whom predeceased her. She is survived by one son and the grand daughter that she adopted and was raising as her own.