Fourteen portable morgues are being sent to hospitals in central Florida amid what an official called “unprecedented deaths” during the state’s COVID-19 crisis.
Each refrigerated morgue has twelve bodies, Orlando Sentinel Lynne Drawdy, executive director of the Florida Central Disaster Medial Coalition, which ordered the units, told the Orlando Sentinel.
“The death toll at the moment is unprecedented,” Drawdy told the newspaper. “What we hear in hospitals is that the death toll right now is higher than it has ever been.”
AdventHealth, which gets three of the mobile phones, said in a statement to WESH Channel 2 that the system also rents refrigerated units at 10 locations in Orange, Osceola, Polk, Seminole and Volusia counties, noting that they are also filling.
The Advent statement says the bodies are backed up because funeral homes and crematoria are also overflowing.
“COVID has never disappeared,” Kimberly Mitchell, owner of Mitchell’s Funeral Home, told WMPG Chanel 6 in Orlando. “Hospitals are starting to run out of rooms [with] refrigeration for people who have passed ”.
The Florida Department of Health reports that 389 people have died from COVID-19 this past week and 43,979 people have died from the virus in the state since the start of the pandemic.
Just over half of Florida residents (52%) have been completely vaccinated against COVID-19.
“There’s no doubt that the delta variant had changed everything,” Orange County Health Officer Raul Pino told Sentinel. “But if we had higher vaccination rates, let’s say 80-85% of our eligible population, the numbers would be smaller.”
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