Sandman -- yes, the same name as the easy-listening song -- startled me with his assertion that health officials always tell the public that there's nothing to fear from piles of cadavers, but rescue officials end up burying them hastily anyway. That often ends up aggravating the suffering of survivors searching vainly for their loved ones.

Why do people resist learning that corpses aren’t all that dangerous?

1. Nausea. Start with the most obvious, most visceral reason: Corpses do make you sick. Literally. The odor of rotting flesh, the sight of bloated bodies being eaten by feral animals — nausea is nearly universal and vomiting is extremely common. Dead bodies do make you sick; it seems almost inconceivable that they don’t also give you sicknesses.
2. Survivor guilt. Dead bodies remind us that we made it and they didn’t. They’re a reproach. Burying the bodies helps alleviate our guilt at failing to save them.
3. Religious obedience. We are instructed to look after our dead when, where, and in the manner specified in our religious tradition. Some religions require followers to dispose of the bodies quickly. The obligation to bury the dead is also a theme in classic dramas such as Sophocles’ Antigone, in which the “law of the gods” requires that Antigone’s brother be buried.
4. Respect. This is largely about our respect for the dead; it is also about our self-respect, which requires us to treat the dead well, even if significant sacrifice is required. Respect is evidenced in poor people’s expenditures on funerals, and in soldiers’ efforts not to leave their dead compatriots behind, even under fire.
5. Recovery symbolism. Unburied bodies indicate that the society is still in chaos. Getting them buried is a sign of recovery. After an individual death, family members rouse themselves from their shock or depression to see to the funeral; that starts the normalization process. After a catastrophe, communities do the same thing.
6. Ghosts and stigma. Every society, no matter how sophisticated, takes ghosts seriously. Some societies believe that victims of sudden death hover nearby until their bodies are laid to rest. Other societies assert aggressively that they believe no such thing, but their fiction, their slang, and their real estate market suggest otherwise. Burying the bodies addresses fears far less tangible than the fear of disease.

All these values and beliefs add up to the overwhelming emotions that lead decision-makers, including local officials in Albay and other disaster areas, to ignore the factual appeals by health officials like Duque and dump anonymous bodies in mass graves anyway. Sandman refers to primal reactions that health officials cannot dismiss as irrational or uneducated.

They need to be acknowledged and legitimized instead. Only then does a factual correction stand at least a small chance of prevailing.

Sandman recommends a five-step process for talking about dead bodies in natural disasters:

1. Tell people the ways that dead bodies can sometimes be hazardous, and that dealing with them is sometimes a health priority.

2. Note that dealing with dead bodies is usually less of a health priority than people naturally suppose.

3. Sympathetically discuss the non-health reasons why nearly all people want to bury the dead quickly.

4. Regretfully point out the more urgent health priorities that compete with burying the bodies for time and other resources.

5. Ask people to join you in making the painful prioritization decisions.

Considering the Philippines probably now leads the world in disaster victims, it must also be on the cutting edge in disaster management. Public communications, including media coverage, in the midst of heavy loss of life must likewise be state of the art, not only incorporating the facts but addressing the extreme emotions that people are going through.