Funeral homes hit by onslaught from COVID19 brace for worse
When the pandemic started, Robert Gordon, CEO of Colma’s expansive Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, purchased refrigerated storage to accommodate an extra 100 bodies.
“When we got months in and didn’t have to use them, I thought, ‘ Well, it’s good we’re not,’ ” he said. “But now, with this last surge, we are starting to use the cooler containers. We are seeing a spike of more than double the number of COVID19 deaths, during a time of year when deaths are high already. Many funeral homes are pushed past their capacity.”
As fatalities mount from the pandemic’s latest escalation, Bay Area funeral homes are struggling to handle the onslaught. The situation could get much worse with an expected increase of infections from Christmas and New Year’s gatherings, which could result in a new
wave of deaths later this month and next.
Families crave the comfort of a final memorial for their loved ones, and funeral directors want to help, but say they are juggling constraints. They must space burials apart for social distancing between various groups. Many don’t have extra refrigeration, which is costly. Embalmers and funeral directors are licensed professionals who can’t simply be hired from temp agencies, so existing employees must put in longer hours. Mandatory paperwork, such as death certificates, takes significantly longer to process. Hospitals with full morgues are asking morticians to remove bodies immediately. Funeral homes and religious leaders alike are struggling to hold services with everchanging rules.
“This is my 50th year in the funeral business, and I’ve never experienced anything like this,” said Harry Green, funeral director of Alameda Funeral and Cremation Services. “Everybody is so busy. Some funeral homes are turning people away.”
In Southern California, the epicenter of the state’s virus activity, many funeral homes are already in dire straits.
“San Bernardino, East L. A., other parts of L. A., are just being overwhelmed,” said Bob Achermann, executive director of the California Funeral Directors Association. “After the first surge in the summer, a lot of funeral homes brought in additional refrigeration capacity, but it’s not enough for what’s happening now. And crematories are backed up.”
By last week, so many bodies were piling up at Los Angeles mortuaries and hospital morgues that the National Guard was called in to help transport corpses to the county medical examinercoroner’s office for temporary storage, the Los Angeles Times reported.
New York provides a horrendous cautionary tale of how a deluge of deaths can overwhelm systems for handling human remains. In April, when more than 800 city residents a day were dying, one Brooklyn funeral home was so inundated that it stored dozens of decomposing bodies inside nonrefrigerated UHaul trucks. Some hospitals used forklifts to transfer piles of corpses to temporary morgues, the New York Times reported, while teams of soldiers were dispatched to pick up people who died at home.
Like much else, the rituals of grief have been upended by the pandemic and shelterinplace orders. Funeral services were initially allowed indoors with limited capacity but now must be conducted outdoors with physical distancing. Counties may limit the number of attendees. Alameda County caps attendees at 25, while Santa Clara County allows up to 100, for instance. Services are much more stark. Extras like pallbearers, flowers, limousines and guest registers are generally eschewed, which also means a loss in revenue for the funeral homes, despite the increase in demand.
“Today it rained all day,” Gordon said last week. “The wind made our tents go down in the middle of a service; we had to rush to fix it.”
For families who want to view their loved one, only 12 are allowed at once and for limited times, said Thomas Halloran, general manager of Duggan’s Funeral Service in San Francisco’s Mission District.
“Without ritual or fanfare, it’s an impossible situation for families,” he said. “Our primary purpose is to provide relief and provide the services, no matter how minimal they may be.”
Even the most mundane aspects of death have been changed. Human remains cannot be buried or cremated without a death certificate and a permit, paperwork that requires doctors’ electronic signoffs and county approval. Mortuaries around the region say it’s taking significantly longer than the standard two to four days to get the approvals.
“A lot of doctors are just overwhelmed; they may not be able to get to this as soon as possible,” said Greer from Alameda Funeral. He has been waiting well over a week for county autopsies on two separate people who died without medical attendance.
Morticians take extra precautions with personal protective gear in handling remains of those who died from COVID19.
“There is no risk of respiratory droplets from the deceased, but there are fluids within the body that generally leak after death occurs,” said Tom Beddingfield, owner of San Jose’s Beddingfield Funeral Service.
His business is handling more than 50% above its normal volume.
“It seems like every day we get in more and more COVIDrelated deaths,” he said. “We’re all working overtime. We haven’t seen a quiet day in the past couple of weeks.”
Ordinarily Beddingfield picks up bodies from hospital morgues. But now, “the nursing supervisors are calling asking to go directly to the room to remove a deceased individual because their morgues are beyond capacity,” he said. “They want us there as quickly as possible so they can turn that room over to another patient. It’s out of hand.”
Funerals take similar contagion precautions as commercial establishments. They also rely more on video streaming.
“We use touchless thermometers, ask CDC questions of all staff and guests, and have plexiglass barriers in place to keep our families and team safe,” said Richard McCown, general manager of Skylawn Funeral Home & Memorial Park in San Mateo. “We have been offering complimentary streaming services in our outdoor tents to allow those who cannot attend to be a part of the service real time.”
Funeral workers — sometimes called “last responders” — are considered essential workers. They are in California’s early phase for vaccinations, after health care workers.
“Contra Costa County reached out three days ago and said they’re at our tier” for vaccinations, said Scott Pennington, president of Sunset View Cemetery and Morgue in El Cerrito, which has 30 fulland parttime workers. “We filled out brief applications and are waiting to hear.”
Staffing and refrigeration are his two top concerns.
“We’ve gotten close a couple of times to not having enough refrigeration, so we’re in the process of contracting with another provider to use a portion of their large walkin cooler refrigerator,” he said. A retired embalmer has returned to work part time to help out.
The current circumstances “are more traumatic for the families, but they want to be able to say goodbye, and we want to accommodate their needs while working through local” rules, said Gordon from Cypress Lawn. “Making funeral arrangements every day is emotionally taxing. It’s hard on everyone.”