California handled roughly 20,000 deaths each month on average, pre-COVID.
Now, that number has risen to 25,000 and the system has run out of room to store bodies.
California Operation of Emergency Services Law Enforcement Chief Mark Pazin told KCBS Radio that the first of 88 refrigerated trailers have been delivered to corners offices in imperial, San Bernardino and Sonoma counties.
Pazin noted that the three counties that have already received trailers "seem to be the hubs of this decedent surge."
Counties have been struggling with bottlenecks in the systems in place for body storage and the backlog is also affecting funeral homes and cemeteries.
2020 -El Paso bodies stored in trailers, Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMario Tama/Getty Images
The first steps to alleviating this pressure on the system was "ensuring that we had room at the coroner’s office of those particular counties, that the funeral homes were prepared to take them, that the families were able to meet with the funeral homes under the COVID-19 constraints," said Pazin.
The refrigerated trailers are being donated by an Illinois-based business logistics company, the HUB group. The LA County coroner has already received 10 other trailers to aid in the handling of close to 12,000 Covid deaths to date.
"Deaths have been so compacted over the past few weeks it has unfortunately bogged down an entire system." Despite the workload, Chief Pazin said the decedents and their families are treated with respect and dignity.
California’s coronavirus death toll has been reaching nearly 400 deaths per day, and the governor’s office has activated it’s multi-casualty plan as it did during the Camp Fire in Paradise in 2018.
