Nevada coroner fears no morgue space if virus not curtailed

RENO, Nev. ( AP) — “This is an awful question, but how many bodies does a freezer cooler hold?”

A Reno newspaper reporter posed it to the local coroner who fears the recent explosion of coronavirus cases could soon overtake not only northern Nevada’s ability to treat the sick, but also store the dead.

COVID-19 is spreading so fast in Nevada that someone contracts it every minute on average and someone else is dies from it about every two hours.

The vast majority of cases and deaths have been in Clark County — the state’s most populous county that includes Las Vegas. But Washoe County, including Reno-Sparks, has recorded 59 COVID-19 deaths the last 30 days — half of those over this past week.

If current trends continue, Washoe County Medical Examiner Laura Knight said the death rate could potentially double over the next two to three weeks. She’s paying close attention because she’s responsible for safe keeping of the victims at the county morgue.

“I could see a scenario where we double and double and then within about a six-week period, we could potentially be filling our capacity,” she told reporters Wednesday.

Knight is working to expedite cremations at funeral homes and mortuaries, many already at 90% capacity, and transfer some bodies to the county’s 200-capacity facility.

It’s currently only 10% full. But fearful of death surges that typically follow infections by two to three weeks, she’s making contingency plans to rent storage units like they did shortly after the pandemic’s outbreak last spring when images of trucks filled with bodies in New York first drew national attention.

She never imagined six months later she’d be crunching budget numbers again to figure out how big of units the county could afford.

Nearly half of Nevada’s 142,239 COVID-19 cases to date have occurred since September — fully onefourth of those in November and 10% over just the last week.

“We have COVID-19 exploding in our community. It is spreading rapidly,” Washoe County Health District Officer Kevin Dick said.