Refrigerated trailer in use as a morgue for COVID casualties
Windsor Regional Hospital is again storing corpses in a refrigerated trailer attached to it's Met campus as COVID-19 casualties exceed morgue capacity.
Hospital CEO David Musyj on Wednesday told the Star the temporary morgue, which has space for 36 bodies, has been in place since April and was used briefly at the end of the pandemic's first wave. But with recent days repeatedly breaking local records for COVID-19 deaths, including a new high of 17 deaths reported by the local health unit on Wednesday, the hospital has put the trailer to use once again.
“The next few weeks, months, are going to be literal hell and we have to be ready for it,” Musyj said. “We're getting as ready as we can.
“Our strategy all along is, you plan for the worst, pray for the best, and be ready for everything in between. That's what we've been doing from Day 1.”
Between Met and Ouellette campuses, there are 24 in-house morgue spaces. A new mega-hospital would have a larger morgue, Musyj said.
Since Dec. 1, 107 people in Windsor-essex have died as a result of COVID-19, with 58 of those deaths reported over the last week.
To date, 187 local residents have lost their lives to the disease.
Use of the external morgue trailer is part of the hospital's pandemic response plan, for which it had done tabletop exercises in 2018 and 2019 in preparation for a possible novel coronavirus.
One of the components of the pandemic plan was morgue space.
“Any type of mass casualty or pandemic, you need to be ready for an influx of deaths,” Musyj said.
“We immediately identified we needed some on-site temporary space, as well as some off-site backup to that.”
That off-site backup morgue space is a twin-pad hockey arena, which Musyj did not identify. The hospital has a lease agreement to use the arena space as a morgue, an option suggested in the federal government's pandemic preparedness plan.
“I hope that we never have to get to the hockey rink for that purpose, but we shall see as the next few weeks unfold.”
During a meeting with municipal leaders and health officials in February, when the hospital first brought up the notion of storing bodies in an arena, Musyj said the roughly 50 people present fell silent.
“The minute we said we need to have a discussion regarding temporary morgue space at a Windsor or county hockey arena, you could hear a pin drop,” he said. That's when the pandemic “became really real, really fast, for everybody in that room,” even though Windsor-essex had not yet recorded a single case of COVID-19.
A body's stay in the morgue is typically brief, unless there are no family or next of kin to claim it, Musyj said.
Regular meetings between the hospital and local funeral homes have ensured things move as efficiently as possible during the pandemic, “and that's worked relatively well.”
The London Health Sciences Centre is also using a refrigerated trailer to store bodies after reaching its in-house morgue capacity of 28.