California funeral homes stretched by pandemic’s growing toll

Rob Karlin has been working seven days a week. When he can catch some rest, he tries to get some.

But the job of handling the delicate details at the end of another person’s life has taken a toll on him, both physically and emotionally.

The rapidly escalating death toll from the coronavirus pandemic in Los Angeles County, the hardest hit region in the US, is overwhelming mortuaries and funeral homes.

In Los Angeles County, the country’s most populous county, the number of novel coronavirus cases passed 1 million on Saturday. For perspective, someone dies every eight minutes in LA County from COVID-19, new estimates show.

Karlin, the 74-year-old owner of the Los Angeles Funeral Service, said COVID-19 has increased the volume at his business by 100 percent. The surge of deaths is causing backlogs in different areas, particularly in refrigeration capacity.

“For instance, the facility we use has 85 spaces to refrigerate bodies, and they are totally full. So we can’t bring a body in until we take a body out,” he said.

The hardest part for Karlin is to turn away families who have just lost a loved one. He has been a licensed funeral director in California since 2001.

“Unfortunately, in the last hour, I had to tell two people that I couldn’t help them, because I have no capacity. It’s a very difficult thing to tell people, ‘I can’t help,’ it’s difficult on them. It’s difficult on me and they have to keep calling places until they could find somebody,” Karlin said.

‘No capacity’

The area’s funeral homes are so inundated with bodies that families often have to wait two to three days before a facility has any space, he said.

“The families are calling 20 funerals homes and getting the same answer. There’s no capacity,” he said.

The pace of fatalities continues to balloon in California, the nation’s epicenter of the pandemic. The state had close to 3 million cases and over 33,000 deaths as of Monday.

The US now has more than 23.9 million cases and over 398,000 COVID-19 deaths, also as of Monday.

Sarah Ardalani, public information officer for the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, said the department is currently holding around 750 bodies from its own investigations, and about 150 from COVID-19 hospital storage.

To help relieve pressure on local mortuaries, the Los Angeles County coroner installed additional refrigerated storage in April. During normal operations, the facility could store up to 500 bodies.

With the additional space, it can hold 1,500 more bodies. The department is working to add additional refrigerated trailers, Ardalani said. Help can’t come soon enough. Hospital morgues are running out of room. If a person passes away in a convalescent home or private residence which have no refrigeration capacity, then the families have to keep their loved ones’ bodies refrigerated before a mortuary can pick them up.

“I am telling families they need to keep the body cool, as cool as they can, which in normal times would mean putting dry ice on the body, or even regular ice, certainly turning the air conditioning on, the body will stay OK for a few days if it’s kept cool.”

Karlin said the funeral industry is experiencing a major backup on all fronts. Cemeteries, for example, won’t allow mourners to go in without making appointments.

“People are making appointments and telling me they can’t get appointments for two or three weeks just to go into the cemetery to arrange when the burial will be,” he said.

“That is a problem because I can’t bring another body in until that body gets buried,” he added.