California Funeral Homes Are Running Out of Room for Bodies

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage across the country, funeral homes in the hard-hit area of Southern California are finding they don’t have enough space to hold all the dead. Funeral home directors “fear they won’t be able to keep up” with the continuing surge of deaths, Bob Achermann, executive director of the California Funeral Directors Association, told the Associated Press. One funeral director in the Los Angeles area told the AP she had to turn grieving families away before deciding to order at least two 50-foot refrigerators to help with the six-fold increase in bodies they’ve seen since the start of the pandemic. “I’ve been in the funeral industry for 40 years and never in my life did I think that this could happen, that I’d have to tell a family, ‘No, we can’t take your family member,’” she was quoted saying. California is seeing a higher rate of new coronavirus cases than any other state in the country. In Los Angeles County alone, 10,000 people have died of the virus. The U.S. reached 20 million coronavirus cases on Jan. 1st and is approaching 350,000 deaths from the virus.