With hospital morgues overwhelmed by an increasing number of bodies amid an increase in COVID-19 deaths, hard-hit parts of California are struggling to store the bodies of those who died.
The Los Angeles County coroner’s office is accelerating efforts to temporarily store the corpses as the local death toll reaches record levels.
This week, six members of the California National Guard arrived to help county workers transfer bodies from hospital morgues to 12 refrigerated storage units parked in the coroner’s office, said Sarah Ardalani, a spokeswoman for the office. Additional National Guard helpers are expected to arrive next week.
Last spring, the coroner’s office predicted an increase in the death toll and at least quadrupled its storage capacity to at least 2,000 bodies bringing the 12 refrigerated trailers, according to Ardalani. There are also additional trailers that can hold about 25 bodies each.
On Monday, the coroner’s office was holding 757 bodies.
In late November, the beginning of the most recent wave of COVID-19, the containers contained only about 60 bodies.
Then, the rate of fatalities began to increase. In early December, about 30 people died each day; on Friday, the seven-day average was about 190 people a day.
More than 4,200 COVID-19 deaths have been reported since December 1, an astonishing number in just a few weeks. The cumulative death toll in LA from the disease is 11,872.
In the past four days alone, an average of 250 COVID-19 deaths per day have been reported in LA County. This is higher than the average number of daily deaths from all other causes combined, including heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, car accidents, suicides and homicides, which is about 170.
Hospital morgues are overcrowded because funeral homes and private morgues are so crowded that they have to send families away. The open spaces in the hospital morgue are being rapidly replaced by new bodies.
To prepare for the sudden increase, the California Governor’s Emergency Services Office is preparing to dispatch 88 refrigerated trailers across the state to complement the morgue space. Ten have already been dispatched to Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Imperial, Monterey and Sonoma counties.
The other 77 trailers, donated by the Illinois-based Hub Group, need to be refurbished with shelves to double their capacity. Cal-OES said there is a plan to install an additional temporary morgue on the county coroner’s campus, with at least five trailers provided by Cal-OES and another five provided by LA County.
These features will help “ensure that we don’t receive large backups or, if we have backups, they will take care of them [with] respect and dignity [and] that we have the appropriate equipment installed or the materials needed for coroners and coroners to deal with the deceased, ”said Cal-OES director Mark Ghilarducci in a statement.
Funeral homes in Fresno County are also under pressure. Mortuaries had to find ways to maximize storage space for the growing death toll, Fresno County interim health officer, Dr. Rais Vohra, said on Tuesday, and mobile refrigeration units are being brought in.
“This is a mass accident, a mass fatality event that our county is going through. And we had to expand the corpse storage areas here in Fresno County beyond normal, ”said Vohra.
How much extra space the county will need depends on how quickly funeral homes and mortuaries can process the bodies, Vohra said.
“It will take the entire ecosystem to try to find the best way to work with this really large number of bodies that they need to care for,” said Vohra. “I’m happy that these two trucks are coming and I hope we don’t need them.”
Phi Do, editor of the Times team, contributed to this report.