Tag Archives: funeral homes

‘I just ask God to help me’: Texas funeral home crushed by death as U.S. COVID toll nears 500,000

By Callaghan O’Hare and Maria Caspani

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Sunday is traditionally a quiet day for Chuck Pryor’s Houston funeral home, but on this Sunday in February, almost a year after the global pandemic reached Texas, the phone was still ringing.

Pryor took the call: COVID-19 had taken yet another American life — pushing the nation’s death toll closer to the half-million mark — and another grieving family required the services of the exhausted funeral director and his staff.

“It’s just mentally taxing,” Pryor, 59, who runs a small funeral home business with his wife Almika, told Reuters earlier this month.

The sheer number of coronavirus deaths has overwhelmed many U.S. funeral homes. Some family-owned businesses have handled a crushing case load, with some seeing the same number of deaths in a couple of months as they would normally handle in a full year, said Dutch Nie, a spokesperson with the National Funeral Directors Association.

“Most funeral home directors know that it’s a 24-hour, 365-day career, but you’re just not used to every single day working those hours,” Nie told Reuters.

The pandemic has brought profound changes to the way Pryor must operate. Overloaded hospitals want bodies to be removed quickly. It has been difficult to find trained staff, caskets and protective equipment. And every day brings a multitude of phone calls from families in pain and distress.

As the virus showed no sign of releasing its grip and deaths mounted over the summer and in the fall, exhausted workers at Pryority Funeral Experience fell ill while others quit.

“People quit because they mentally can’t handle it,” he said. “I pray God, — just give me strength… I want to run away right now, to be honest …I’m concerned about myself breaking down so I just ask God to help me.”

Sometimes the stories he hears on the job haunt him.

Like the one he was told when he answered a COVID-19 call on a recent weekend in The Woodlands, a suburb of Houston.

A young woman in her 30s had just died from complications from the virus, a while after doctors performed a C-section to save the life of her twins as her condition deteriorated.

The following day, Pryor was having a hard time processing the tragedy, one of the hundreds of thousands that have marked a year of profound loss across the entire country, and the world.

“I slept with it last night and I hate that, you know, when you take them to bed,” he said.

NEVER SO BUSY

Pryor said he had never been as busy as during the pandemic. The deaths the funeral home handled in 2020 were more than double those he would see in a normal year.

January was a terrible month. Even as hospitalizations in Texas fell by 10% last month from a 36% rise in December, coronavirus deaths increased by 48%, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

“I do pace myself and I do turn people down because I can only do so much,” Pryor said.

His staff of four full-time employees and eight part-timers is feeling the strain, he said.

Embalmers and others who come directly into contact with bodies and are at higher risk of contagion, have been hard to find, Pryor said. And caskets are in short supply due to the pandemic. On a Thursday earlier this month, Pryor’s uncle drove four hours from Dallas to deliver eight of them.

The job is so consuming, Pryor said, there is little time left to perform the most essential personal tasks, like cooking or spending time with his soon-to-be 10-year-old son.

While caring for those who lost loved ones in his community, Pryor’s family was faced with their own grief. The virus took his nephew and his uncle while his wife lost her cousin and her aunt to COVID-19.

‘HOOKED’ ON HELPING PEOPLE

Pryor grew up in rural Texas, the youngest of six and the only one of his siblings who did not attend segregated schools. His first brush with the funeral business was in the late 1970’s when he would help illiterate members of his community with their mail and bills at the local funeral home on the first of every month.

“I got hooked in helping people when they need help the most,” Pryor said.

Since he started his own business in 1984, celebrating life even in death had always been front and center in his profession, he said. But the coronavirus pandemic turned everything “upside down,” making it even more difficult to help people through the grieving process.

In late January, Pryor and his team handled the funeral arrangements for Gregory Blanks, a 50-year-old COVID-19 victim who ran a heating and air conditioning business in the Houston area. He was a huge fan of the Dallas Cowboys football team.

In keeping with current restrictions to prevent infections, only a limited number of family and friends were able to attend the burial at San Felipe Community Cemetery where a preacher spoke next to a table lined with baseball caps for the Cowboys and other Texas teams.

Clad in a face mask sporting the logo of her husband’s company, Blanks’ wife Lila solemnly watched as some of Pryor’s workers lowered the casket into the ground.

“People, they can’t hug,” Pryor said. “They cry and no one’s there to wipe your tears.”

(Reporting by Maria Caspani in New York and Callaghan O’Hare in Houston, additional reporting by Anurag Maan in Bengaluru; Writing by Maria Caspani; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Mexican funeral homes face ‘horrific’ unseen coronavirus toll

By Drazen Jorgic

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Like many people around the world, Mexican funeral home owner Salvador Ascencio did not believe at first the coronavirus outbreak was going to be a big deal.

Then calls from grieving relatives began to pour in.

During the first 11 days of May, his small funeral parlor in a run-down part of Mexico City dealt with 30 bodies, a more than four-fold spike in daily funeral services compared to the same period last May.

“I have never experienced a situation like this,” said Ascencio, 52, encircled by shiny wooden coffins in the cramped parlour of a business his family has operated since 1973.

“The truth is that what we are experiencing is horrific.”

Reuters surveyed 18 funeral homes and crematoriums across the capital, including several belonging to Mexico’s two biggest chains. They also reported rocketing demand for their services during the pandemic.

The findings suggest that official statistics in Mexico may be far underestimating the true death toll from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

Mexico’s government has acknowledged that the real number of fatalities is higher than the official tally of 5,666 coronavirus deaths nationwide, though it says it has limited tools to measure accurately how much higher because Mexico has the lowest testing rate among OECD countries.

Hugo Lopez-Gatell, Mexico’s coronavirus tsar and deputy health minister, said earlier this month in response to media reports about Mexico undercounting fatalities that people often arrive at hospital too sick for a timely laboratory test.

The federal government has also acknowledged there is sometimes a lag between coronavirus deaths and their inclusion in daily official figures due to delays in certifying deaths and processing information from hospitals and morgues.

Complicating efforts to estimate the true impact of the pandemic, Mexico has no real-time statistics on deaths nationwide: the most recent published mortality data is from 2018.

That makes it difficult to calculate ‘excess mortality’: a term used by epidemiologists to estimate the increase in deaths, versus normal conditions, attributable to a public health crisis.

Based on information from 13 funerals homes in the capital belonging to Mexico’s two biggest chains, the excess mortality rate in the first week of May could be at least 2.5 times higher than the government’s official coronavirus tally during that period, according to Reuters calculations.

While death rates could vary according to neighborhoods and over time, infectious disease specialist Alejandro Macias, an academic and Mexico’s national commissioner for influenza during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, was explained the news agency’s findings and said a calculation of more than twice the announced number of deaths sounded about right.

“In these times, saying double doesn’t sound too much to me,” said Macias, adding that it may be “even a little bigger.”

One of the funeral home chains, J. Garcia Lopez, told Reuters it had registered a 40% increase in funeral services in early May in Mexico City compared to last year and was handling an average of 50 fatalities per day. The other chain, Grupo Gayosso, saw a 70% spike.

Based on the last three years for which mortality data is available, Mexico City saw an average of 6,048 deaths in May between 2016 and 2018, or a daily rate of 195 deaths.

Taking the more conservative J. Garcia Lopez funeral data as a guideline, a 40% increase in deaths would equate to an average of 273 people dying daily in the capital in the first week of May – equivalent to an additional 78 deaths per day above the average of 2016-2018.

That would be roughly two and a half times the government’s official COVID-19 death tally in Mexico City, published on Monday, of 32 fatalities per day in the first week of May.

Excess mortality figures are a recognized means of determining the impact of a pandemic, he said, adding Mexico’s “severe underestimation” of the death toll did not indicate a conspiracy by the government to suppress numbers. “It’s a consequence of not doing enough tests,” Macias said.

Data from funeral homes and death registries has contradicted official coronavirus death tolls in other nations across the globe, including in Italy and Indonesia.

Although the Reuters estimate was only an approximation, it was broadly in line with a survey of death certificates by Mexican non-profit MCCI published this week that found three times as many confirmed, probable or suspected COVID-19 deaths.

Asked by Reuters about its findings and whether the death toll could be significantly higher than officially reported, a spokesman for the Mexico City government, Ivan Escalante, said a scientific commission established last week by the local authorities to bring more transparency to the pandemic death numbers would seek to determine that, including by examining suspected cases.

Officially, 1,108 people had died from the coronavirus in Mexico City by Monday. Mexico on May 12 reported its most lethal day yet with 353 coronavirus fatalities.

OVERFLOWING MORGUES

In the Izaz Cremaciones crematorium in Iztapalapa, the epicenter of Mexico City’s outbreak, black smoke billowed from chimneys last week whenever a coronavirus victim was cremated. The thicker smoke was due to extra layers of plastic wrapped around the bodies, workers said.

Izaz cremated 239 people in the first 11 days of May, compared with the 188 people it cremated during the whole of May last year. The increase was due in part to the government advising cremation for all suspected coronavirus cases.The company has introduced 24-hour shifts to operate its two crematorium ovens.

More than a third of Izaz’s cremations at the start of the month were confirmed or “probable COVID-19” cases, according to death certificates in the crematorium registry.

Funeral home J. Lopez Garcia also said more than a third of the daily cases in the same period were “COVID and/or atypical pneumonia.”

Workers using hearses to ferry the bodies of coronavirus victims to crematoriums around the capital have taken on the look of astronauts, sheathed in hazmat suits and gas masks.

“We had to call almost seven crematoriums to find a space,” said Francisco Juarez, whose family run a funeral business on the other side of Mexico City from Izaz.

“It’s something I’ve never seen, the hospitals are full,” he said. “The areas holding the bodies are now completely filled up.”

The surge in demand for funeral services has coincided with many public hospitals overflowing. By Monday evening, 47 of 64 hospitals in the Mexico City metropolitan areas were full and 13 were near capacity, government data showed.

Figures from Grupo Gayosso, which operates 21 funeral homes in 13 cities, point to rising coronavirus deaths elsewhere in the country too.

In the northern border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali, they more than doubled, said Alejandro Sosa, the chain’s operations director.

Ascencio said he keeps receiving calls from people who suspect their relatives have been killed by the coronavirus.

If the toll keeps rising, he said, he won’t be able to handle them all because the city does not have enough facilities to cremate the bodies of the victims, he said.

“Unfortunately, there are not enough ovens,” Ascencio said.

(This story has been refiled to change to ‘Macias’ from ‘he’ in paragraph 20 to establish who is being quoted)

(Reporting by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Daniel Wallis)

New York City crematories work overtime as coronavirus brings backlog of bodies

By Nick Brown and Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York City crematories are extending their hours, burning bodies into the night. The state has started a running tally of all cremations and burials. City officials are surveying upstate cemeteries for temporary interment sites.

The destructive spread of the coronavirus through New York has not yet reached its peak, but those who put the dead to rest have never been busier.

Funeral homes and cemetery directors described a surge in demand unseen in decades from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus that has infected tens of thousands and killed roughly 1,400 in New York City.

“We’ve been preparing for a worst-case scenario,” said Mike Lanotte, executive director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association, “which is in a lot of ways starting to materialize.”

A majority of New Yorkers choose cremation over burial, but the most-populous U.S. city has only four crematories: one in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn and two in Queens. Directors at two of those locations said their daily workload has jumped from around 10 bodies to 15 or more, straining resources.

New York state has relaxed air-quality regulations to allow crematories to burn for longer hours. Still, in interviews with Reuters this week, the crematory directors reported phones ringing off the hooks and days busier than any in decades.

“No one could really imagine this happening,” said J.P. Di Troia, president of Fresh Pond Crematory in Queens, calling the pandemic among the most devastating events in his 52 years in business.

The crematory at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is taking between 15 and 20 bodies a day of late, nearly double its usual load, according to cemetery president Rich Moylan.

Like Di Troia, Moylan struggles to remember a time in his 48 years at Green-Wood when he has seen so many deaths from a single cause. “The closest comparison is September 11th,” he said, referring to the al Qaeda attacks on New York City in 2001.

Funeral homes report longer waits for cremations.

“My fridge is full,” said Andrew Nimmo, manager of Bergen Funeral Service Inc, which can store about 40 bodies. “I can’t get people out (to crematories) right away.”

That backlog is trickling down to hospitals. The Brooklyn Hospital Center said in a statement on Tuesday that the bodies of deceased patients were spending more time than usual in its morgues because “grieving families cannot quickly make arrangements.”

New York’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has sent refrigerated trucks and tents to hospitals to house more bodies. So far, that has mostly been enough. OCME buildings can store about 800 to 900 bodies, but the trucks have increased that to around 3,500, according to Aja Worthy-Davis, an OCME spokeswoman.

The body count is only expected to rise.

Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, unveiled modeling on Wednesday showing the U.S. death toll could reach as high as 240,000, as President Donald Trump called stay-at-home guidelines a “matter of life and death.” New York is the current epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.

ISLAND INTERMENTS

For the first time, the New York State Division of Cemeteries is requesting daily reports from cemeteries on the number of cremations and burials each day, according to David Fleming, legislative director for the New York State Association of Cemeteries.

Fleming has been working with city and state emergency planning officials to survey cemeteries and crematories in upstate New York that could ease the strain if the death rate surges higher. Some cemeteries may set aside land for temporary interments.

“It’s not a crashing system. We do have plans in place if there needs to be release of capacity from the city to more outlying areas,” Fleming said.

Hart Island, off the Bronx’s east shore in Long Island Sound, may also serve as a site for temporary interment, according to an OCME planning document for dealing with a surge of deaths from a pandemic.

The island is home to the city’s potter’s field, a cemetery for people with no next of kin or whose families cannot arrange funerals.

In normal times inmates from city jails each week bury some 25 New Yorkers there. But the number of burials on Hart jumped in the last week of March to 72, according to Jason Kersten, a spokesman at the Department of Correction, which oversees the island. Kersten referred questions about causes of death to OCME, which did not respond.

ABRIDGED GOODBYES

The pandemic is taking a toll on the funeral industry’s clientele, too – an emotional one. New York’s ban on public gatherings means families must curtail goodbyes to their loved ones.

Green-Wood is asking mourners, no more than 10 per funeral, to stay in their cars until casket-carriers have left the grave site to try to prevent the spread of the virus. Bergen Funeral Service is limiting wakes to immediate family only, its manager said.

At the Lawrence H. Woodward Funeral Home in Brooklyn, director Kendall Lindsay is asking mourners not to touch caskets. “If you have (COVID-19), you’re going to put it on the casket, and we have cemetery gentleman who have to touch it,” Lindsay said.

With services in synagogues canceled, Rabbi Arthur Schneier of Park East Synagogue in Manhattan said some mourning families are coming together through video apps like Zoom.

“It’s important to honor the dead, but another conflicting principle is the sanctity of life,” Schneier said. “This is the conflict that families endure.”

(Reporting by Nick Brown and Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Gabriella Borter in New York; Editing by Ross Colvin and Will Dunham)