As communities in various parts of the United States suffer from the increase in coronavirus cases, funeral homes in the high-contagion zone of Southern California have had to reject families of dead people because they are running out of space. before the accumulation of corpses.
Los Angeles County, the epicenter of the crisis in California, has already surpassed 10,000 deaths by COVID. Hospitals in the area are overflowing and have trouble maintaining their basics, such as oxygen, to treat a record number of patients with respiratory problems. On Saturday, crews from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers arrived to supply oxygen from some hospitals.
Nationally, an average of just over 2,500 people have died from COVID-19 in the past seven days, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The number per day of new cases recorded in this period has averaged almost 195,000, a decline from the previous two weeks. It is feared that New Year’s Eve meetings could cause another surge in contagion.
The head of the state funeral directors association said the morgues are filling up in California, while the death toll from COVID-19 in the U.S. topped 350,000 on Sunday. Experts anticipate another increase in coronavirus cases and deaths resulting from meetings that took place during Christmas and New Year.
Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University show that the United States exceeded the threshold Sunday morning. More than 20 million people in the country have been infected. The United States has begun using two coronavirus vaccines to protect health care workers and nursing home residents and their caregivers, but the launch of the inoculation program has been criticized as slow and chaotic.
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Several states have reported record numbers of cases in recent days, including North Carolina and Arizona. The United States has reported by far the highest number of deaths from COVID-19 in the world, followed by Brazil, which has reported more than 195,000 deaths.
“I’ve been in the funeral industry for 40 years and never in my life did I think this could happen, to say to a family,‘ No, we can’t receive your family member, ’” said Magda Maldonado , owner of the Continental Funeral Home in Los Angeles.
Continental uses an average of 30 corpses per day, six times its normal figure. The owners of the morgues call each other to see if anyone can receive bodies and the answer is always the same: they are full.
In order to meet the high demand due to the large number of corpses, Maldonado has washed extra 15-meter (50-foot) refrigerators for two of the four facilities it manages in Los Angeles and neighboring counties. Continental has also taken a day or two to pick up the bodies in hospitals in order to serve residential customers.
Bob Achermann, executive director of the California Funeral Home Directors Association, said the entire process of burial and cremation of corpses has slowed down, including the embalming of corpses 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 “all the funeral homes I’ve talked to say ‘we’re working as fast as we can’.” “The volume is just amazing 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.”