LOS ANGELES (AP) – As communities in various parts of the country experience an increase in coronavirus cases, funeral homes in the high-contagion area of Southern California say they have had to turn away families of the deceased because they are running out of space before the accumulation of corpses.
The head of the state’s association of funeral directors says morgues are filling up as the United States approaches the macabre death toll of 350,000 from COVID-19. More than 20 million people in the country have been infected, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
“I’ve been in the funeral industry for 40 years and never in my life did I think this could happen, say to a family: ‘No, we cannot receive your family member,'” said Magda Maldonado, owner of Continental Funeral. Home in Los Angeles.
Continental is handling an average of 30 bodies a day, six times its normal figure. The morgue owners call each other to see if anyone can receive bodies and the answer is always the same: they are full.
To meet the high demand due to the large body count, Maldonado has rented extra 50-foot (15-meter) refrigerators for two of the four facilities it manages in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. Continental has also taken a day or two to collect bodies from hospitals to serve residential clients.
Bob Achermann, executive director of the California Funeral Directors Association, said the entire burial and cremation process has slowed down, including the embalming of bodies and the processing of death certificates. In normal times, cremation could take place in a day or two, now there is a delay of at least a week or more.
Achermann said that in the southern part of the state, “every funeral home I’ve talked to says ‘we’re working as fast as we can.’ “The volume is just incredible and they fear they won’t be able to keep up,” he added. “And the worst of the increase could still be waiting for us.”
Los Angeles County, the epicenter of the crisis in California, has already exceeded 10,000 deaths from COVID. Hospitals in the area are overwhelmed and struggling to maintain the basics, such as oxygen, to treat a record number of patients with respiratory problems. On Saturday, crews from the US Army Corps of Engineers arrived to supply oxygen to some hospitals.
Nationwide, an average of just over 2,500 people have died of COVID-19 in the past seven days, according to data from Johns Hopkins. The daily number of new cases registered in that period has averaged nearly 195,000, a decline from the previous two weeks. It is feared that the end-of-year meetings could cause another spike in infections.
