The pandemic is hitting the Rio Grand Valley hard, and funeral homes are so full the state has sent in help. Help in this case means refrigerated trucks to store bodies.
Johnny Garcia, managing partner with the Ceballos-Diaz Funeral Home in Edinburg says his funeral home is at full capacity, so much so that they've had to buy a special refrigerator that houses three bodies.
Garcia says the state has placed four 50 foot trailers at the Weslaco airport. He says several more are parked outside Valley hospitals in Edinburg, McAllen, Mission, Brownsville and Harligen.
"We take the loved one over there and they tag them and do an inventory and they register the person into the trailer. When we go back to retrieve the loved one they go ahead and sign them out to us so we can keep the proper identification process going."He says nearly all the deaths are covid related "because of the way the pandemic has spread. You walk into hospitals to pick up a loved one and you pretty much see every patient in a prone position on their stomach on ventilators or some type of breathing device."He says before Covid they averaged between five to ten funerals a month. Now his home is getting at least five calls a day. "Our phones are ringing. Death calls are coming on almost one an hour. Sometimes we'll get two in the same hour."According to the state, Hispanics make up more than 40 percent of confirmed coronavirus cases, far more than any other group.