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218 Marlpool Ln, Kidderminster DY11 5DL, UK

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Attwood Funerals 220 Marlpool Ln, Kidderminster DY11 5DL, UK

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Attwood Funerals 220 Marlpool Ln, Kidderminster DY11 5DL, UK

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Registering a death has become much easier for relatives and now all done on line, cremation paperwork is also mostly completed and submitted online.
During the first wave in Spring 2020 funeral numbers were cut right down and people were opting for direct cremations, now in the second wave they are adapting to restrictions by having more unusual coffins and transport. The trend has completely changed. Most families have cremation ceremonies webcast.
As a funeral director and celebrant I personally feel my hands are tied behind my back and am finding the lack of physical human contact at this time of great need is crippling and leaves a deep sense of not being able to do my job properly.

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Funeral with 80 grandchildren who form a 'guard of honor' due to corona restrictions

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Een uitvaart in coronatijden: dat betekent 15 mensen die de plechtigheid binnen mogen volgen. Niet zo gemakkelijk als je een grote familie hebt, zoals André Loosveldt uit Rekkem. Hij had, samen met zijn vrouw Geneviève, 10 kinderen. Dat resulteerde intussen in 80 klein- en achterkleinkinderen. "Zij mogen door de coronacrisis niet binnen in de kerk", zegt dochter Chris. "We proberen dat op een creatieve manier op te lossen. De klein- en achterkleinkinderen zullen zaterdag daarom een erehaag vormen van de kerk tot aan de begraafplaats. Ze gaan allemaal een mondmasker dragen en gaan 2 meter uit elkaar staan. Zo verloopt alles coronaproof."

André overleed dinsdag in het fel geplaagde woonzorgcentrum Zilvervogel in Rekkem, waar hij sinds 2010 verbleef. Hij raakte er in maart al besmet met het coronavirus. "Hij is daar nooit echt ziek van geweest", vertelt Chris. "In de tweede golf raakte hij opnieuw besmet, dit keer wel met ernstige symptomen. Die zijn hem fataal geworden."

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Uitvaart met erehaag van 80 (achter)kleinkinderen voor man van 97 in Rekkem: "Door corona kunnen ze niet binnen"

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Een uitvaart in coronatijden: dat betekent 15 mensen die de plechtigheid binnen mogen volgen. Niet zo gemakkelijk als je een grote familie hebt, zoals André Loosveldt uit Rekkem. Hij had, samen met zijn vrouw Geneviève, 10 kinderen. Dat resulteerde intussen in 80 klein- en achterkleinkinderen.

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Humans have developed a multitude of death and mourning rites over the ages to help them grieve when they lose a loved one. But all over the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on how burials and funerals can be conducted.

The novel coronavirus has infected more than 2.5 million Brazilians as of late July - more than 1% of the population, according to official figures. As part of measures to avoid outbreaks back in March, the Health Ministry issued strict guidelines regarding funerals, banning wakes and open-casket viewings.

Read more: Latin America struggles to contain the pandemic

"Usually, bodies are kept in an open casket for one day," explained cultural anthropologist Andreia Vicente da Silva of Western Parana State University. "It's common for relatives and friends to attend a wake and share their suffering and stories, and even to speak with their late loved one. They might even touch the body."

If there are no forensic reasons preventing it, a body is supposed to be buried within 24 hours.

Special precautions are taken with COVID-19 victims

Importance of acknowledging death

For Elaine Alves, a psychologist and grief counselor based in Sao Paolo, the timing of these rites is not important. What's vital is that they take place. "Seeing a body, acknowledging that a loved one is no longer reacting to words or contact, this all helps to understand that somebody is dead. It also helps the grieving process," she said.

But the pandemic has put an end to wakes for the moment, and funerals are taking place in accelerated fashion. If a person dies of COVID-19 in hospital, their body will be wrapped in a plastic body bag and put directly in a coffin. If they're lucky, relatives might be able to see the sealed coffin for a moment before it's put in the ground.
Read more: Coronavirus: When saying a final goodbye is banned
Much of this depends on how undertakers and cemeteries implement the governmental guidelines, explained Vicente da Silva, who has talked with many mourners as part of her research.

"Some of them told me that gravediggers were very considerate. Others said that they didn't even have time to say a prayer before the first shovelfuls of earth landed on the coffin. One woman said that her late husband had been disgraced," she said.

'Nobody gets used to death'

Brazil has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates in the world. According to official figures collected by Johns Hopkins University, more than 90,000 people have died as of July 30. The sheer number of bodies has seen municipalities forced to implement measures that would have been unthinkable just last year.

The northern city of Manaus even resorted to stacking coffins in mass graves, but stopped the practice after protests. The mass graves, however, have continued. In Sao Paulo, bodies are now being buried at night if the number of daily deaths surpasses 400.

In Manaus, COVID-19 victims are being buried in mass graves

Even without the pandemic, Brazil has a high death rate. In the past decade, the country has witnessed some 50,000 murders every year: almost 240 homicides per million inhabitants. By comparison, there were fewer than 10 per million in the European Union.

The number of people who die in traffic accidents in Brazil is also four times higher than in the EU, and Brazilians are more likely to die of curable diseases because of their poor health care system. This is particularly true for Brazil's poorer population, which has also witnessed disproportionate cases of COVID-19.

Read more: Brazil's favelas forced to fight coronavirus alone

But the fact that death seems to be more frequent does not make it any easier to deal with, said Alves. "Nobody gets used to death," she said. "Each death and form of grief is individual, especially when it comes to close relatives or friends."

"The death of another person is also so difficult to bear because it reminds us of our own mortality," added Vicente da Silva.

Digital media help mourning process
Read more: Coronavirus: A magic moment for social media?
Faced with challenge, many Brazilians are using digital media to create new rites and ways of mourning during the pandemic. People have been communicating with isolated relatives via Skype, WhatsApp and other platforms, sometimes even saying goodbye to people on the brink of death.

"This preemptive grief before death significantly helps the mourning process afterward," said Alves. However, she also said that she expected a rise in psychological trauma, which can have a physiological impact and lead to heart disease, diabetes or other health issues.

"If someone has a predisposition for a certain illness, it might be triggered at this point," she said, adding that these problems are exacerbated by the fact that people are isolated because of the pandemic and unable to find solace in the social contact that is so important when somebody dies. Here too, however, the internet can help. For example: The traditional masses that usually take place seven and 30 days after a death are now frequently being conducted online.

Vicente da Silva said online collective commemoration, such as on Facebook or individual websites, could also help and even provide comfort to strangers.

"People who have died of COVID-19 can be seen as the victims of a collective trauma," she said. "This can create a feeling of identification with other mourners and help people to overcome their own pain."

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COVID-19 pandemic robs Brazil's mourners of traditional rites | DW | 30.07.2020

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Humans have developed a multitude of death and mourning rites over the ages to help them grieve when they lose a loved one. But all over the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on how burials and funerals can be conducted.

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When virus patients died, New York hospitals were faced with a sensitive problem: What to do with thousands of personal items?

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Mount Sinai Hospital collected and stored Rafael Eli's belongings soon after his death in April.

"They couldn't find them for a while," Ms. Eli, 66, said.

Mr. Eli with his sister, Myriam Eli. Credit... via Joe Schramm

When the number of casualties started rising in mid-April, the Bureau of Funeral Directing in the New York City Health Department and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner issued guideline s outlining the best practices for health care facilities to safely manage the belongings of patients who died of Covid-19.

To deal with the surge of items, many hospitals quickly adjusted their property management services.

At St. Barnabas, a deceased person's items no longer accompanied them to the hospital's morgue. Instead, the items were stored in the morgue's viewing room, where a team of three hospital workers would list them in a spreadsheet, said Mr. Long, the hospital's security director.

Demetrius Long, right, director of security at St. Barnabas Hospital, who oversaw the fatality management program, and James Andino, associate director of security and morgue manager.

Jo-Ann Delgado, patient advocate at N.Y.U. Medical Center, knew how much families cared about the personal items.

A man whose mother died at Queens Hospital rushed to pick up her jacket, which contained a treasured locket in its sleeve.

A man who lost his father at N.Y.U. Langone-Tisch Hospital was elated when a worker told him they would mail him his father's tefillin, a pair of cubic black leather boxes with leather straps that go around the arm that Jewish adults, especially Orthodox men, use during morning prayer.

Joe Schramm, right, was Mr. Eli's best friend and business partner. Credit... via Joe Schramm

Mr. Schramm was given Mr. Eli's belongings and was also asked to clean out his apartment.

"I just wanted to have a little touch of what he had at the very end," Mr. Schramm said. "It was the only thing I could hang onto."

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These Are the Heartbreaking Belongings That Covid Victims Left Behind

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When virus patients died, New York hospitals were faced with a sensitive problem: What to do with thousands of personal items? "They couldn't find them for a while," Ms. Eli, 66, said.

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'A good death' during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK: a report on key findings and recommendations

Dealing with death and bereavement in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic will present significant challenges for at least the next three months. The current situation does not allow for families andbcommunities to be involved in the process of death in ways in which they would normally hope or expect to be. In addition, mortality rates will disproportionately affect vulnerable households. The government has identified the following communities as being at increased risk: single parent households; multi-generational Black and Minority Ethnic groups; men without degrees in lone households and/or in precarious work; small family business owners in their 50s; and elderlyhouseholds. Our study focused on these groups. This report presents a summary of findings and key recommendations by a team of anthropologists from the London School of Economics who conducted a public survey and 58 cross-community interviews between 3 and 9 April 2020. It explores ways to prepare these communities and households for impending deaths with communications and policy support. More information on the research methodology, data protection and ethical procedures is available in Appendix 1. A summary of relevant existing research can be found in Appendix 2. A list of key contacts across communities for consultation is available on request. Research was focused on “what a good death looks like” for people across all faiths and for vulnerable groups. It examined how communities were already adapting how they dealt with processes of dying, burials, funerals and bereavement during the pandemic, and responding to new government regulations. It specifically focused on five transitions in the process of death, and what consultation processes, policies and communications strategies could be mobilised to support communities through these phases.

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Bear, Laura , Simpson, Nikita , Angland, Michael , Bhogal, Jaskiran K. , Bowers, Rebecca , Cannell, Fenella , Gardner, Katy , Lohiya, Anishka , James, Deborah , Jivraj, Naseem , Koch, Insa , Laws, Megan , Lipton, Jonah , Long, Nicholas J. Vieira, Jordan , Watt, Connor , Whittle, Catherine and Zidaru-Barbulescu, Teo (2020) 'A good death' during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK: a report on key findings and recommendations. . London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. ORCID: 0000-0002-4088-1661 ,

Abstract

Dealing with death and bereavement in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic will present significant challenges for at least the next three months. The current situation does not allow for families andbcommunities to be involved in the process of death in ways in which they would normally hope or expect to be. In addition, mortality rates will disproportionately affect vulnerable households. The government has identified the following communities as being at increased risk: single parent households; multi-generational Black and Minority Ethnic groups; men without degrees in lone households and/or in precarious work; small family business owners in their 50s; and elderlyhouseholds. Our study focused on these groups. This report presents a summary of findings and key recommendations by a team of anthropologists from the London School of Economics who conducted a public survey and 58 cross-community interviews between 3 and 9 April 2020. It explores ways to prepare these communities and households for impending deaths with communications and policy support. More information on the research methodology, data protection and ethical procedures is available in Appendix 1. A summary of relevant existing research can be found in Appendix 2. A list of key contacts across communities for consultation is available on request. Research was focused on "what a good death looks like" for people across all faiths and for vulnerable groups. It examined how communities were already adapting how they dealt with processes of dying, burials, funerals and bereavement during the pandemic, and responding to new government regulations. It specifically focused on five transitions in the process of death, and what consultation processes, policies and communications strategies could be mobilised to support communities through these phases.

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'A good death' during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK: a report on key findings and recommendations

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Bear, Laura , Simpson, Nikita , Angland, Michael , Bhogal, Jaskiran K. , Bowers, Rebecca , Cannell, Fenella , Gardner, Katy , Lohiya, Anishka , James, Deborah , Jivraj, Naseem , Koch, Insa , Laws, Megan , Lipton, Jonah , Long, Nicholas J.

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"Bill Riley held a funeral ceremony for his elderly mum in the grounds of Heads Nook Hall, near Carlisle, where she lived in a cottage for more than 40 years. He didn't want to give her a graveside service, which many have had to have during the lockdown"

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Bill Riley held a funeral ceremony for his elderly mum in the grounds of Heads Nook Hall, near Carlisle, where she lived in a cottage for more than 40 years. He didn't want to give her a graveside service, which many have had to have during the lockdown

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Bill Riley held a funeral ceremony for his elderly mum in the grounds of Heads Nook Hall, near Carlisle, where she lived in a cottage for more than 40 years. He didn't want to give her a graveside service, which many have had to have during the lockdown https://t.co/aPTI0HHSn7

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Bill Riley held a funeral ceremony for his elderly mum in the grounds of Heads Nook Hall, near Carlisle, where she lived in a cottage for more than 40 years. He didn't want to give her a graveside service, which many have had to have during the lockdown pic.twitter.com/aPTI0HHSn7
— BBC Radio Cumbria (@BBC_Cumbria) June 12, 2020

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Bill Riley held a funeral ceremony for his elderly mum in the grounds of Heads Nook Hall, near Carlisle, where she lived in a cottage for more than 40 years. He didn't want to give her a graveside service, which many have had to have during the lockdown https://t.co/aPTI0HHSn7

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Bill Riley held a funeral ceremony for his elderly mum in the grounds of Heads Nook Hall, near Carlisle, where she lived in a cottage for more than 40 years. He didn't want to give her a graveside service, which many have had to have during the lockdown https://t.co/aPTI0HHSn7

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Bill Riley held a funeral ceremony for his elderly mum in the grounds of Heads Nook Hall, near Carlisle, where she lived in a cottage for more than 40 years. He didn't want to give her a graveside service, which many have had to have during the lockdown

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In Deutschland haben wir es den Umständen entsprechend noch ziemlich gut getroffen, was die Todesfälle angeht, die wir dem Coronavirus verdanken. Andere Länder sind da deutlich mehr gebeutelt, wenn wir zum Beispiel nach Italien, Spanien oder Iran blicken. Unabhängig davon sind wir aber in unserer Bewegungsfreiheit derzeit sehr stark eingeschränkt.

Hier in NRW darf ich immerhin noch ohne Angabe von Gründen auf die Straße, solange mich nicht mehr als eine Person begleitet und die üblichen Regeln eingehalten werden. Aber was würde ich machen, wenn jetzt ein guter Freund oder jemand aus der Verwandtschaft verstirbt, unabhängig ob durch Covid-19 oder durch irgendwas anderes?

In dem Fall wäre man doppelt getroffen: Man verliert einen lieben oder gar geliebten Menschen und man bekommt nicht die Gelegenheit, sich angemessen von ihm zu verabschieden, weil die Ausgangsbeschränkungen das nicht zulassen. Eine Möglichkeit zur Teilnahme gäbe es aber, wenngleich es nicht das Selbe ist: Man könnte der Zeremonie per Livestream beiwohnen.

In der ersten Sekunde fand ich den Gedanken noch befremdlich, weil man mit Livestreams einfach andere Dinge verbindet. Aber schon sehr schnell konnte ich mich mit der Idee anfreunden, weil es einen absoluten Mehrwert gegenüber einer komplett verpassten Beerdigung bietet und das nicht nur in Corona-Krisenzeiten.

In diesem Fall liegt der Vorteil auf der Hand: Wir dürfen nicht raus bzw. uns nicht zu mehreren versammeln - dank Stream kann ich aber zumindest virtuell Abschied nehmen, den Worten bei der Ansprache lauschen, sich dem Menschen nochmal (relativ) nahe fühlen. Hätten wir aber gerade diese Ausgangsbeschränkung nicht, gäbe es weitere Punkte, die dafür sprechen. Gerade ältere Menschen sind nicht mehr so gut zu Fuß, dass sie problemlos so einer Zeremonie beiwohnen müssen - erst recht, wenn sie weit weg wohnen und eine lange Anreise in Kauf nehmen müssten.

Außerdem denke ich da gerade an Menschen, die es psychisch vielleicht nicht schaffen, sich mit anderen Trauernden am Grab zu versammeln. Auch für diese Leute wäre es eine Möglichkeit, der Person nochmal während der Zeremonie zu gedenken und zumindest auf eine Art irgendwie auch dabei sein zu können.

Ganz ehrlich: Bis eben wusste ich gar nicht, dass es sowas überhaupt gibt. Ich stolperte bei der Futurezone über einen entsprechenden Beitrag. Dort wurde berichtet, dass das Bestattungsunternehmen Himmelblau als erster diesen Service in Wien anbietet und weitere Unternehmen in der österreichischen Hauptstadt ebenfalls nachziehen wollen.

Es wurde darauf hingewiesen, dass nur die Zeremonie an sich gefilmt würde, nicht etwa die Reaktionen der Anwesenden. Den Livestream zuhause kann dann nur sehen, wer das benötigte Passwort besitzt. Außerdem wurde noch auf einen weiteren Vorteil hingewiesen wurde, den das Mitfilmen der Zeremonie mit sich bringt:

Darüber hinaus zeichnen wir das Ganze zusätzlich als Erinnerung bzw. für all die Angehörigen und Freunde auf, die nicht über das technische Wissen oder entsprechende Geräte verfügen, um dem Livestream beizuwohnen. Diese können das Begräbnis dann zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt ansehen Jacob Homan, Geschäftsführer des Bestattungsunternehmen Himmelblau

Eine kurze Recherche zeigte mir sehr flott, dass die Idee keinesfalls neu ist. In Großbritannien nahm dieser Trend seinen Anfang und das bereits vor zehn Jahren. Das Unternehmen Cornwall Funeral Services ist auf dem Gebiet ein ganz alter Hase und bietet seinen Kunden mehr als nur den Stream des Begräbnisses an sich.

Die Liveübertragung beginnt da nämlich schon deutlich früher - mit dem Eintreffen der ersten Gäste. Das Konzept von Cornwall Funeral Services sieht nämlich vor, dass der Livestream nicht nur möglich machen soll, dass man sieht, was sich bei der Zeremonie tut, sondern zudem dem Zuschauer auch das Gefühl vermitteln soll, selbst Teil der Veranstaltung zu sein.

Sähe man dann, wie die anderen Gäste ankommen und wie sich die Zeremonie entwickelt, würde man eher das Gefühl haben, Teil des Ganzen zu sein. Wie gesagt: Mein erster Gedanke war, dass die ganze Nummer irgendwie makaber klingt, aber im Endeffekt ist es ein wirklich sinniger Ansatz, um vielen Menschen den Zugang zur Zeremonie zu ermöglichen, die ohne diese Technik keine Chance dazu hätten.

Cornwall Funeral Services erklärt zudem, dass der frühe Beginn des Streams auch noch die Funktion habe, den Zuschauern die Möglichkeit zu bieten, vor der eigentlichen Beerdigung die Technik zu überprüfen. Der beste Livestream bringt ja auch nichts, wenn im entscheidenden Augenblick festgestellt wird, dass irgendwas nicht funktioniert und man schlimmstenfalls vor einem dunklen Screen sitzt.

Diese Dienstleistung ist mittlerweile auch in Deutschland angekommen und so kann man beispielsweise bei Mymoria nicht nur besagten Livestream buchen, sondern auch die ganze Beerdigung online planen. Eine sehr schöne Möglichkeit für all jene, die in dieser schweren Zeit nicht möchten, dass jemand zu einem ins Haus kommt und euch in Katalogen blättern lässt.

Das Krematorium Hemau geht sogar noch einen Schritt weiter: Wie bei den Wiener Kollegen gibt es die Möglichkeit, per verschlüsseltem, passwortgeschütztem Stream der Veranstaltung beizuwohnen oder sich das Ganze nachträglich als Video anzuschauen. Zusätzlich kann man aber auch noch einen Webcam-Stream dazu buchen für maximal ein Jahr, der einem die Möglichkeit gibt, rund um die Uhr zur Urne schalten zu können. Werden also vor Ort Kerzen zur Andacht angezündet, kann man auch da live dabei sein.

Gerade in diesen Zeiten könnte ich mir vorstellen, dass dieses Angebot boomen wird. Aber besonders bei Beerdigungen dürfte das Alter der Eingeladenen überdurchschnittlich hoch sein, was die Wahrscheinlichkeit erhöht, dass es Menschen gibt, die wegen ihres körperlichen Zustands nicht vor Ort sein können. Tut es also bitte nicht vorschnell als makabere Nummer oder als Geschäftemacherei ab (zumal der Stream oftmals kostenlos angeboten wird)! Der Stream kann nicht ersetzen, was die persönliche Anwesenheit einem Trauernden bringen kann. Die Gespräche mit den Gästen, das persönliche Verabschieden vom Toten, vielleicht auch einfach das "gute" Gefühl, mit seiner Trauer unter Gleichgesinnten und nicht allein zu sein. Aber - für all die Menschen, die aus den verschiedensten Gründen nicht vor Ort sein können, ist das ein absolut probates Mittel.

mehr dazu bei evangelisch.de und Vorsorge Weitblick

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Coronakrise: Per Livestream bei der Beerdigung dabei

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In Deutschland haben wir es den Umständen entsprechend noch ziemlich gut getroffen, was die Todesfälle angeht, die wir dem Coronavirus verdanken. Andere Länder sind da deutlich mehr gebeutelt, wenn wir zum Beispiel nach Italien, Spanien oder Iran blicken. Unabhängig davon sind wir aber in unserer Bewegungsfreiheit derzeit sehr stark eingeschränkt.

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June 4, 2020:
Alachua County

COVID-19 Deaths:

8

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On March 31st the Sri Lanka's Ministry of Health issued COVID-19 guidelines saying the standard procedure of disposing bodies should be cremation. Reversing an earlier guideline that allowed traditional Islamic burials.

The World Health Organisation's guidelines for the safe management of a dead body during the coronavirus crisis allows for either burials or cremations. So it's unclear why the Sri Lankan government has decided to veer away from this decision.

A history of tension

The denial of burials for Muslims is causing international tension as it reignites the flames of the religious civil war the country has faced in the not so distant past, between the Buddhist majority and the Muslim minority.

Hilmy Ahamed, vice president of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka, told Al Jazeera."The Muslim community sees this as a racist agenda of extremist Buddhist forces that seem to hold the government to ransom."

Biraj Patnaik, Amnesty International's South Asia Director, said: "At this difficult time, the authorities should be bringing communities together - not deepening divisions between them .

Sri Lankan Muslims rights denied

The first death of a Muslim in Sri Lanka - in Negombo, a western coastal town - took place on Tuesday (31 March) before national guidelines were revised to exclude burials. Despite protests by the relatives of the deceased, community leaders and Muslim politicians, a burial was blocked by the authorities and cremation took place instead.

The second death in the Muslim community happened on Wednesday (1 April) at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the person was cremated a day later despite efforts by the victim's family and members of the Muslim community to carry out a burial.

A watching international community

The world is currently under panic thanks to the coronavirus and these kinds of mandates led to concern that religious tensions could be reignited if Muslim families not allowed to bury relatives in accordance with religious practice.

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Outcry in Sri Lanka as the government mandates cremation only for COVID-19 victims

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Amnesty International calls out the Sri Lanka government for forcing Muslim COVID-19 victims to be cremated against families' wishes. On March 31st the Sri Lanka's Ministry of Health issued COVID-19 guidelines saying the standard procedure of disposing bodies should be cremation. Reversing an earlier guideline that allowed traditional Islamic burials.

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Spain Declares 10-Day Mourning Period to Pay Tribute to the Nearly 27,000 Lives Lost to Coronavirus

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Spain Declares 10-Day Mourning Period to Pay Tribute to the Nearly 27,000 Lives Lost to COVID-19

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From May 27 until June 5, the Spanish government will pay tribute to nearly 27,000 confirmed deaths from the coronavirus.

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Remember Me...

Welcome to this online book of remembrance for all those who have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. You can submit the name of someone who has died, or view entries, using the buttons below

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St Paul's Cathedral memorial site for those who have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. An enduring space for all people to share in grief and compassion as we work in hope for the future.

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Part of the May Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

It seems like such a distant memory now, but there was a time when Imam Ahmed Ali Uzir of Brooklyn's Iqra Masjid Community & Tradition would lead one or two Islamicfuneral prayers, known as janazah prayers, a month. That was before Covid-19 ravaged the city; now, he might perform five in a row. On one particularly somber day a few weeks ago, he recited nine.

Ali remembers the moment it all began: A funeral home he works with called and asked for his help. "I went there thinking that it might be a few bodies - one day, two days. And it's over a month now."

He estimates that he's overseen 150 burials in the past five weeks. Many were Covid-19 victims of varied backgrounds - Pakistani, Bangladeshi, African American. In one case, a woman didn't go in for her necessary dialysis because of the crisis;fear of seeking care is a side effect of the pandemic that has become common around the world.

The earliest days of the crisis were the most daunting; funeral homes like Al-Rayaan Muslim Funeral Services in Brooklyn didn't have proper guidelines from the government, and the health risks around handling bodies of Covid-19 victims were unclear. Many of Al-Rayaan's employees left their jobs out of fear, and soon the imam, who is typically called upon only to recite the janazah prayer, was involved at every step: helping to retrieve bodies from homes and hospitals, performing the ghusl(washing) and draping the kafan (shrouding) in accordance with Islamic practice, transporting the bodies to the cemetery, and occasionally even climbing into empty graves to help ease in the caskets.

"As an imam, I am considering myself an essential worker," Ali says. "I'm just a community servant. This is the time that I have to stand next to my community. You can talk about God, how important it is to trust in almighty Allah - now is the time to prove it."

He recalls a father who was seeking help "because nobody was washing bodies,"Alisays. "He came and he said, 'Can you please wash my son?' And I looked at him and I said, 'Okay, I will do it, don't worry.'"

As a believer, he says, he has an obligation to help his community maintain the rites and rituals of Muslim burial. "We should not have fear of death, because that's a reality. That's what I believe, and that's why I am out there."

The virus, however, initially led manyMuslim scholars to make adjustments to traditional funeral practices in light of the circumstances: Instead of the ghusl ritual to wash the bodies, they performed tayammum over sealed body bags, a practice that allows the use of sand where water is not available. But guidelines have changed in recent weeks, and now ghuslis being performed again, with proper precautions.

Safeguards are also now in place during the janazah prayers themselves: Only close friends and family are permitted, and the congregants, who usually line up shoulder to shoulder, now space out in accordance with social distancing measures.

Burying the victims of Covid-19 has required safety measures for Ali as well.And so, "Every day for the past five weeks, I wear the same clothes," he says. "These clothes are a little thick, so I feel they are more protective." He washes them each night and hangs them to dry in the living room, where he stays separately from his wife and three sons. "At the door I remove all clothes, put them in a bag, take them to the laundry, and go straight to shower."

Part of the imam's work now is to retrieve bodies in preparation for burial. "Yesterday they told me we have two removals - removals means that somebody passed away in [their] home and now we have to go and pick up the body from home," he says. "We went to one hospital and picked up one body and one body from home in Long Island." He brings them to Al-Rayaan, where families gather to mourn. Photographer Lori Hawkins captured several of these funerals overseen by the imam last month.

Muslim funerals are simple affairs: The deceased are meant to be covered in three pieces of white cotton cloth and buried directly in the ground, but since cemeteries often require bodies to be buried in caskets, the shrouded bodies are placed in plain wooden caskets instead. Inscribed on these caskets are the word "raas" in Arabic, which means "head," designating which direction the body has been placed; Muslims are buried with their head facing toward the Kaaba, the structure at the heart of the Great Mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site.

Many of the burials take place at the Marlboro Muslim Memorial Cemetery in New Jersey. Even though the imam enforces social distancing as much as possible, sometimes empathy takes precedence. He recalls a follower who lost both his son and his wife. "That was a moment I said, 'Come on, brother, let me hug you.' We are too much into hugging and handshaking; that's our culture."

At a recent funeral in New Jersey, family members took turns placing handfuls of dirt on top of the grave of Mohammed Ullah, observing an important rite in the Muslim burial tradition. "One day, when we're going to die, someone else has to do it for us. That's why it's good if we help someone and put dirt on others' graves," explains Ali. "When someone's going to do it for us, it's kind of a karz, a debt. Washing the body is also karz, because someone is going to wash our body - so when our time comes, we are not under anyone's debt."

Ullah was 67 whenhe died in April from Covid-related breathing complications. He leaves behind his wife, two sons, four daughters, and 17 grandchildren. "He was very selfless, caring, and dedicated," says his grandson Mohammad Shamim. "I can never forget his legacy and what he has done to ensure our well-being in the US and family members back in Bangladesh."

For Ullah and all the others he has buried in recent weeks, Ali recites the janazah:

Oh Allah! Forgive those of us who are alive and those of us who are dead; those of us who are present and those of us who are absent; those of us who are young and those of us who are adults; our males and our females. Oh Allah! Whomsoever You keep alive, let him live as a follower of Islam and whomsoever You cause to die, let him die as a Believer.

Occasionally, Ali performs a burial for someone who has no friends or family to mourn them. With so many funerals performed back to back, he asks other families to join him in praying for the deceased. For one such man, named William Johnson, he says he told family members who were at the cemetery for the other funerals he would conduct that day, "'Listen, there's nobody with this person. As a responsibility, we all have to be his family.' He actually got a bigger funeral prayer than other people. Everyone came and joined the burial process."

Given the frequency of the burials and his close contact with families of people who have died from Covid-19, Ali suspects that he may have contracted the disease as well, but despite his symptoms, he isn't certain. "I tried to go to different locations and they kicked me out. They said, 'No, we cannot test you,'" he says. He turned to his faith.

"I saw that a lot of people prayed for me, and I saw the power of prayer for the first time. As an imam we know prayers help, but that's when I experienced it."
is a freelance writer who covers travel, food, and culture for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Saveur, and many other publications. Lori Hawkins Support Vox's explanatory journalism is an award-winning photographer based in New York City, where she is photographing the Covid-19 pandemic. She has covered refugee issues, health crises, and natural disasters.
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox's work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources - particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

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"I am considering myself an essential worker": An imam on carrying out Muslim funerals amid the pandemic

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Part of the May Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. It seems like such a distant memory now, but there was a time when Imam Ahmed Ali Uzir of Brooklyn's Iqra Masjid Community & Tradition would lead one or two Islamicfuneral prayers, known as janazah prayers, a month.

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The funeral industry has had to adapt to new regulations around death care during the pandemic at the same time as dealing with an increase in work. Poppy’s Funerals in south London is one provider that believes that public health concerns should not impact upon its ability to carry out its role with humanity and respect. The Guardian spent the day inside its mortuary to see how the firm and its staff have adapted to the new challenges they face

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The funeral industry has had to adapt to new regulations around death care during the pandemic at the same time as dealing with an increase in work. Poppy's Funerals in south London is one provider that believes that public health concerns should not impact upon its ability to carry out its role with humanity and respect. The Guardian spent the day inside its mortuary to see how the firm and its staff have adapted to the new challenges they face

If you've been affected by bereavement during the pandemic, guidance and advice can be found here

With thanks to Jeanne Rathbone and family

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Pandemic funerals: inside a mortuary during coronavirus - video

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The funeral industry has had to adapt to new regulations around death care during the pandemic at the same time as dealing with an increase in work. Poppy's Funerals in south London is one provider that believes that public health concerns should not impact upon its ability to carry out its role with humanity and respect.

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Minutes before the rabbi started intoning funeral prayers over a shrouded coffin, his phone rang. The dead man: 90 years old, a victim of coronavirus, had been lying in a morgue for a couple of weeks while the authorities and his synagogue had tried to trace his relatives.

The man was one of 440 British Jews who had died from coronavirus by Monday, a statistic that belies the impact of the virus on the Jewish community, which has been disproportionately hit by Covid-19. Figures compiled by the Board of Deputies of British Jews suggest that more than 1% of all coronavirus deaths are Jewish, while Jews are only 0.4% of the total UK population.

Now the man's grandson was on the line from Dubai. Although he had lost touch with his grandfather 30 years ago, he was able to give Rabbi Daniel Epstein valuable biographical information to supplement the man's name, age and cause of death. Even so, the only people present to witness the coffin being lowered into its grave were the rabbi and staff of Waltham Abbey Jewish cemetery, in Essex, on the edge of London.

In normal times, it is rare to conduct a funeral without mourners, but not now. The number of burials conducted by the United Synagogue Burial Society more than tripled in April, Epstein said. Some rabbis have officiated at three or four funerals a day - and in many cases, relatives and friends were unable to say a last goodbye to their loved one due to self-isolation or restrictions on travel.

"My rabbi's tools are no longer just a prayer book but also a tripod and a phone," said Epstein, who has conducted a number of funerals over Zoom.

Where Covid-19 has been the cause of death, tahara - the Jewish ritual of preparing a body for burial by washing, reciting prayers and psalms, and dressing it in a shroud - has not been performed. "We still strive to give people a dignified funeral," said Epstein, after he and cemetery staff had shovelled clods of earth into the grave, a final act customarily undertaken by relatives as a way of honouring the dead.

The Board of Deputies stressed that the full picture of Jewish Covid-19 deaths will not be known for months or even years. But it was concerned that "deaths in our community may have been at a higher level, particularly in the early stages of the UK outbreak", said a spokesperson.

The Jewish festival of Purim, on 9 to 10 March, a joyous occasion when families and friends gather to eat, drink, dance and attend synagogue, is thought to have helped spread the virus. A couple of weeks later, as the UK locked down, burial societies began reporting high numbers of coronavirus deaths.

"Back then people were joking about coronavirus. Now of course it's a totally different ball game but that was probably the most significant event, calendar-wise, prior to infections picking up," said Dan Smith, of Misaskim, which organises almost all Jewish funerals in Greater Manchester.

There have also been concerns that pockets of ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, Jews - the fastest growing sector of British Jewry - did not heed messages in the early days to close synagogues and practise physical distancing. Haredi Jews rarely engage with the mainstream media and have limited access to the internet. Multi-generational households living in sometimes cramped conditions may have also aided the spread of the disease.

'It's grief upon grief': the harsh reality of funerals in lockdown

Amid reports of men congregating in synagogues, and some weddings and funerals flouting distancing guidance, community leaders in London and Manchester organised fliers in Yiddish to be posted through letterboxes and for messages to be broadcast via loudhailers from cars driving through Haredi neighbourhoods.

This week, about 300 Haredi Jews in north London celebrated the festival of Lag B'Omer with bonfires and gatherings where physical distancing was not observed, reported the Jewish Chronicle.

Since the lockdown began, Misakim has conducted some 90 burials. "Normally we average between 170 and 190 funerals a year," said Smith. "There were points during the crisis where we were doing 10 a day. A significant percentage - perhaps seven out of 10 - involved people where we were told to treat them as Covid deaths, even if it didn't say they had died from Covid on the death certificate."

Smith's father, Harold Smith, a solicitor, died in London from Covid-19 on 25 March, aged 74. Unable to attend the funeral, Smith watched the ceremony via Zoom. It was sad for such a family-minded man to be buried without all of his four children, 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren present, he said.

Smith then sat Shiva, the week-long mourning period for Jews, alone in Manchester. "It was just surreal. You've got seven days normally when the mourners can't go out and typically you have people coming in and out to console them. It's very much a community peer-counselling period.

"But I was alone, there was no one coming in. People made the effort to be in touch via Zoom or Whatsapp, but it was fundamentally different to the normal period of sitting Shiva."
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'My rabbi's tools now include a phone': UK Jewish burials changed by Covid-19

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Minutes before the rabbi started intoning funeral prayers over a shrouded coffin, his phone rang. The dead man: 90 years old, a victim of coronavirus, had been lying in a morgue for a couple of weeks while the authorities and his synagogue had tried to trace his relatives.

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The Nana Otafrija pallbearers might look slick, but they are not afraid to get dirty. Their signature moves, carried out with a coffin in tow, include dropping to all-fours and crawling in unison; or lying on their backs, the coffin balanced on top of them, legs moving in time to the music - as though they have been crushed by the casket.

The dancing pallbearers first became famous in 2017 when their so-called "coffin dance" featured in a BBC documentary. Then, someone added an EDM track and a meme was born: footage of the dancers was spliced with botched feats of strength and other accidents and posted all over the internet.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic has transformed their performance into a way to warn people of the dangers of ignoring social distancing.

In India, policemen dressed in uniform danced along to the track while carrying a (healthy) man on a stretcher. In Peru, police dressed in riot gear did the same, with a mock coffin.

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The dance has even been used by protesters mourning the economy in Lebanon: in Beirut men dressed as the pallbearers marched a mock coffin decorated with the fast-depreciating Lebanese Lira down the streets.

Fans can buy miniatures of the Nana Otafrija dancers from Hong Kong, or go to a Taiwanese bar where drinks are served by pallbearers. There's also a video game-inspired version, where Mario dies and the pallbearers appear in pixellated form, moving in time to chiptune.

Benjamin Aidoo, the lead pallbearer, lists the Mario version among his favourites. His dancers have also taken it upon themselves to warn the public about the dangers of ignoring social distancing measures, with the help of a new slogan: "Stay at home or dance with us".

Speaking from his home in Accra, Aidoo told the Guardian that he started working as a pallbearer while in high school in 2003. He came up with the idea of dancing with the coffin because he wanted people to be able to celebrate their dead. He also noticed that people would often grow so upset at their solemn funerals that they would faint or injure themselves. If they could focus on the dancing, he reasoned, they would be less likely to get hurt.

Once the pandemic is over, Aidoo hopes to teach people around the world to hold uplifting funerals.

"Most people love the display", said Aidoo, "because they want to be happy." When people's parents die, for example, "You know what your mom and dad did for you," said Aidoo. "Why should you cry?"

"When you know the life that he or she spent before dying, I think it's a great thing for you to celebrate."

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Benjamin Aidoo. Photograph: Helen Sullivan/The Guardian

Things changed for Aidoo's business when the family of a member of parliament who had died hired Aidoo and his fellow pallbearers - but insisted they wear all-white, matching outfits. The MP's family paid for the outfits and the funeral celebration went so well that they tipped handsomely, too.

"That was the first time I ever saw a $100 bill," said Aidoo.

Coronavirus could 'smoulder' in Africa for several years, WHO warns

After that, he said, "I had a vision for what I am doing."

Aidoo now employs about 100 staff: 95 men and five women. Two of the women are lead pallbearers, like Aidoo: they march in front of the coffin with a cane - decorated with the Ghanaian flag - and top hat.

Aidoo has also recently hired a manager and together the pair are trying to build a global brand.

Asked how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting his business in Ghana, Aidoo explained that funerals are now restricted to 25 people - including pallbearers - and are sombre affairs. There's no singing and dancing - so some people are keeping their loved ones' bodies in the morgue until restrictions are lifted and they're able to hold a large burial, with his dancers.

Once the pandemic is over he hopes to travel and to open branches of his pallbearing business in other countries, where people will be able to hire Adioo-style coffin dancers.

He urged his fans to "Stay safe, stay alive, respect the rules and regulations given to them."

"One day we will surely get there. This pandemic will be over and then we'll all meet."

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'Why should you cry?' Ghana's dancing pallbearers find new fame during Covid-19

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The Nana Otafrija pallbearers might look slick, but they are not afraid to get dirty. Their signature moves, carried out with a coffin in tow, include dropping to all-fours and crawling in unison; or lying on their backs, the coffin balanced on top of them, legs moving in time to the music - as though they have been crushed by the casket.

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A Colombian advertising company is pitching a novel if morbid solution to shortages of hospital beds and coffins during the coronavirus pandemic: combine them.

ABC Displays has created a cardboard bed with metal railings that designers say can double as a casket if a patient dies.

Company manager Rodolfo Gómez said he was inspired to find a way to help after watching events unfold recently in nearby Ecuador.

Families in the coastal city of Guayaquil waited with dead loved ones in their homes for days last month as COVID-19 cases surged. Many could not find or were unable to afford a wood coffin, using donated cardboard ones instead.

"Poor families don't have a way of paying for a coffin," Gómez said.

Gómez said he plans to donate 10 of his new beds to Colombia's Amazonas department, where resources are in short supply. So far there is no indication whether the beds will be put to use and no orders have been placed.

The Bogota-based company is usually at work on advertisements but has been mostly paralyzed over the last month as Colombia remains on lockdown. The South American nation has reported nearly 9,500 confirmed cases of the virus.

The beds can hold a weight of 330 pounds (150 kilograms) and will cost about $85 each, Gómez said. He said he worked with a private clinic on the design, which he hopes will be put to use in emergency clinics that might become short on beds.

At least one doctor was skeptical of how sturdy a cardboard bed might be. He also warned that any corpses should first be placed in a sealed bag before being put in a cardboard coffin to avoid potentially spreading the disease.

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Colombian company creates bed that can double as coffin as pandemic hits hospitals | The Japan Times

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A Colombian advertising company is pitching a novel if morbid solution to shortages of hospital beds and coffins during the coronavirus pandemic: combine them. ABC Displays has created a cardboard bed with metal railings that designers say can double as a casket if a patient dies.

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A chapel at Farenga Brothers Funeral Home in the Bronx that has been used to store bodies during the pandemic. Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Overwhelmed by bodies, funeral homes are struggling to fulfill their mission to grieving families.

A chapel at Farenga Brothers Funeral Home in the Bronx that has been used to store bodies during the pandemic. Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Photographs by

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Sal is the old soul of the Farenga family, the one who wears his grandfather's Miraculous Medal around his neck, a Catholic symbol meant to bestow grace on the wearer. (Nick wears his grandfather's World War II dog tags, which he says have felt grimly relevant now.) Sal is also the family worrier: "An 80-year-old Italian man in a 40-year-old body," his mother, Rosemarie, says. On a desk in the office that Sal shares with Nick, stacked papers sit next to a pack of Sal's Marlboros and an array of black neck ties. Nick's dress shoes lie on the floor, along with Sal's crumpled pants, hastily taken off after a funeral and before he had to pick up more bodies.

As the Bronx has changed over generations, so have the Farengas' clients - in addition to Italians, Irish and Puerto Rican families, Nick and Sal work with families who are Albanian, Guyanese, Nigerian, Indian and Vietnamese. The brothers know all about Irish wakes and large Italian funerals but also that Albanians sometimes ship the dead home, to be buried in their ancestral ground. Many Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists hold ceremonies at crematories where they witness the body being placed in the retort, as the cremation furnaces are known.

After 20 minutes, Kam got a text: "He's here," Nick wrote.

Kam texted her entire family. "It is done."

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How Do You Maintain Dignity for the Dead in a Pandemic?

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Overwhelmed by bodies, funeral homes are struggling to fulfill their mission to grieving families. A chapel at Farenga Brothers Funeral Home in the Bronx that has been used to store bodies during the pandemic. Credit...

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I do work on death studies and Covid has made my work more complicated.

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Ronald Smith, owner of Sterling & Smith Funeral Directors, which has locations in Fresno, Dinuba, and Tulare, said that due to the current health crisis, funeral services have been limited due to bans on large gatherings. Photo by Frank Lopez

published on April 20, 2020 - 10:57 AM
Written by Frank Lopez

Though the effects of the coronavirus are more apparent in our everyday lives with the temporary closure on non-essential businesses, empty shelves at grocery stores and many people out of work, it's also having an effect on industries that deal with more unexpected matters.

In mid-March, Gov. Newsom issued sweeping guidance for the state to ban gatherings of 250 more, which postponed or cancelled many music festivals, concerts, corporate events, weddings and other types of gatherings. The number continually went down and current federal guidelines suggest gatherings should be limited to 10 people.

With the restrictions on large gatherings, an already difficult situation is presented with even more difficulty: funerals.

The U.S. funeral industry is estimated to be a more than $20-billion-dollar a year industry, according to a Forbes article published in April 2019.

Current guidance from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) states, "There is currently no known risk associated with being in the same room at a funeral or visitation service with the body of someone who died of COVID-19."

The CDC does note however, that people should not touch the body of someone who has died of the COVID-19 disease.

As the numbers of those testing positive for COVID-19 keep going up in the U.S., the crisis is spelling a downturn for the funeral industry.

Joseph Johnson, founder and owner of Wildrose Chapel & Funeral Home on Divisadero Street in Downtown Fresno, said that the ongoing health crisis is limiting the services they can offer, and leading to different funeral service choices by the surviving relatives or loved ones.

Along with not allowing anyone into the building for business activity, the company is not having funeral visitations in the funeral home. Though different cemeteries and funeral homes have different policies and rules, Wildrose Chapel is only allowing 10 people at the burial service, including the priest and a funeral attendant.

Johnson said that he understands that a family would want to hold a funeral visitation for a loved one that has passed, but he is not willing to take the risk amidst the ongoing health crisis.

Johnson said there was a recent incident where clients were allowing multiple groups of 10 at time, which was against a certain cemetery's rules.

"It's not worth the risk. If they have to have a visitation, we're not offended; they just have to use a different funeral home," Johnson said. "I don't know how long this will last, but hopefully families will start learning that you have to comply with the rules and regulations."

Richard Mendivil, funeral director and manager at Peers-Lorentzen Funeral Service in Tulare, said that after the statewide "shelter-in-place" orders, they started getting fewer requests for full, traditional service funerals.

Many clients are having small gravesite services or opting for cremation so they could hold a full-service visitation with more guests at a later date.

The economic shutdown caused by the pandemic, leaving many people out of work, may leave those organizing a funeral to choose cheaper options.

The average cost of a funeral with cremation is about $6,000, and the median cost of a funeral and a burial is about $8,500, according to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).

The 2018 NFDA Cremation & Burial Report, the cremation rate is projected to reach 70% by 2030, with prices continuing to increase as more consumers select the option.

Mendivil said that Tulare County is stricter with its funeral procedures during the health crisis, and that people will sit in their cars as the minister performs a blessing, and then the family leaves.

The funeral home was planning to ship remains to Mexico, but because of the COVID-19 outbreak closing the doors of the Mexican Consulates, which process the needed documents, the surviving family opted for cremation and will send the remains at a later date.

"[Surviving relatives] are cutting way back. We're not doing big chapel or church services, they are going very minimal," Mendivil said. "They're not buying the book for people to sign, they're not buying the handouts. All they're doing is a gravesite, or even if they do cremation when they wanted to do burial, that cuts back on our income tremendously."

Ronald Smith, owner of Sterling & Smith Funeral Directors, Inc., which has locations in Fresno, Tulare, and Dinuba, said that he has had customers postpone services in the hope the current pandemic will end soon.

Other families are opting for gravesite burial services, particularly Catholic families that might expect a priest to only do graveside services with a minimal number of immediate family members present.

"We still have people who want to see their loved ones," Smith said. "We have viewings where we maximize the number of people coming in to 10 at a time, encouraging people to pay their last respects and head out. We still have some that want the large gatherings and are willing to wait to have it."

Smith said he had one family wait six months for a body to be buried so it could be delivered to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Even though more people trend toward cremation in California, Smith said, many families still want to pay their final respects with a viewing.

With fewer people opting out of traditional, full-service funerals, periphery businesses such as a floral shops are feeling the pain as well.

"Anytime someone says they don't want a viewing or they don't want to use our chapel, we do lose revenue," Smith said. "We do have a decline in revenue, but we are just hoping that it doesn't get too bad, and that it doesn't extend too long."

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Pandemic spells grave times for funeral industry

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Though the effects of the coronavirus are more apparent in our everyday lives with the temporary closure on non-essential businesses, empty shelves at grocery stores and many people out of work, it's also having an effect on industries that deal with more unexpected matters.

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Kim Zambito, a 29-year-old funeral director in Brooklyn, is driving, always driving.

On April 18, a week after New York City's Covid-19 daily death toll peaked at over 800, she did three house removals, put about six bodies in caskets, and moved at least a dozen more around the funeral home to prepare them for burial the next day. After dinner, Zambito retrieved three more bodies from Lutheran Hospital and brought them back to Sherman's Flatbush Memorial Chapel, a busy Jewish firm where she works.

Amy Cunningham, another Brooklyn funeral director, is struggling to keep up with phone calls. She has her own boutique firm, Fitting Tribute, and is affiliated with Sherman's and uses the chapels at Green-Wood cemetery, home to one of the city's very busy crematoriums.

In contrast to the embalming, elaborate caskets, and formal viewings offered at legacy funeral homes, Fitting Tribute emphasizes green burial practices and home rituals. Cunningham gives families the opportunity to prepare the body of their loved one for burial or cremation and to create their own memorial service.

But the risk of spreading Covid-19 further has prevented families - and Cunningham - from being in casual contact with the dead, deeply altering her practice. There is no anointing of the body, no comforting embraces for the grieving. The entire industry is so busy, firms have begun sending families to their competitors. "I'm getting thanked for just staying on the line with people," Cunningham told me.

Some of the most memorable images of the pandemic are forklifts loading bodies into refrigerator trucks and mass graves on Hart Island, the city's potter's field near the Bronx, where the poor and unclaimed are buried. But talking to funeral directors like Zambito and Cunningham reveals that the forklifts and the mass graves are not chaos and crisis, but the death industry expertly managing the spike in fatalities with orderly and well-planned contingencies, and creativity. Despite limited resources and New York's largest mass casualty event in more than 100 years, there are no bodies in the street.

That's because Zambito, Cunningham, and funeral directors all over the city have been racing to balance the needs of bereaved families with the overwhelmed resources of the funeral industry. Most have put aside competition, budget goals, and the more elaborate practices of their trade to manage as best they can the unprecedented challenges Covid-19 has brought them. "I think the public would feel comforted knowing there are people who care this much to ensure dignity in death remains intact," says Zambito.

Funeral directors' care for the dead honors our longstanding social contract. "To treat a dead body as if it were ordinary organic matter," writes Thomas Laqueur in The Work of the Dead, "is to erase it from culture and the human community." Particularly in times of crisis, the work of funeral directors is to reassure people that society will remain intact.

Yet the death of more than 18,000 people in New York City and over 25,000 in the state from Covid-19 as of May 5 has also exposed the often-hidden industrialized nature of funeral home work. Forklifts, body bags, and refrigerators are now out in the open, for all to see, the reverence of funeral ceremony displaced by the pragmatism of corpse management. The disillusion reminds us of the conundrum of the dead: The body is both organic matter and sacred to our conceptions of self and society.

"It's orderly chaos, well-labeled and dated"

"A Brooklyn hospital on Tuesday resumed its use of a forklift to move the dead bodies of coronavirus victims, just hours after the shocking practice was exposed on the front page of The Post," the New York Post proclaimed on March 31.

"Shocking Photos Show What It Looks like When a Hospital Runs Out of Room for Coronavirus Corpses," read a headline at Vice News about Sinai Grace Hospital in Detroit. Drone footage of mass graves on Hart Island appeared in multiple newspapers, including the New York Times. The New York Police Department later seized the drone, reinforcing the perception that the graves are disrespectful.

Forklifts and other large equipment have long been a part of the behind-the-curtains work of morticians and funeral directors. Mechanized lifts make the work of moving bodies - into morgue refrigerators, into crematoriums - less laborious and dangerous. The unclaimed and indigent of New York have been buried in mass graves on Hart Island for a hundred years. Body bags are standard issue for hospitals and funeral homes.

Yet the media has fixated on these common tools and procedures to capitalize on people's fear and romantic notions of death - it's been generations since American families have handled their own loved ones' corpses. Our contemporary understanding of death seldom includes decomposition.

"The media is acting like they've caught the government in a vile conspiracy," Caitlin Doughty, a California mortician and bestselling author, recently said in a lively video installment on her YouTube channel, "Ask a Mortician," "Refrigerated trucks are a good thing. They keep those extra bodies cool, safe, and distant from the population."

Cunningham explains the equipment comes into play when there are many bodies and little space to keep them. "It's not a juicy scandal," she said. "It's orderly chaos, well labeled and dated." Bodies have to be stacked in trucks out of necessity.

Maybe, Doughty offers, the public outrage at forklifts is because many don't understand how industrialized the funeral industry is. Maybe people are (rightly) made uncomfortable when they see how the city's poor are buried, in plain boxes in mass graves on Hart Island. Or maybe, she suggests, public reaction to these images is caused by death's emergence from our subconscious; the pandemic has made death a daily fact of conscious life.

Covid-19 is straining funeral homes, crematoriums, and cemeteries

The epidemic has made clear that most of us don't have a clear understanding of the work done by the people in the death trade. "Along with terror, suffering and death, a plague brings a macabre logistical problem: lots of corpses that need to be disposed of," Jody Rosen recently wrote at the New York Times.

We enter into the funeral directors' realm once a loved one takes their last breath. If they unexpectedly die at home - 1,125 New Yorkers died outside a hospital in the first five days of April, per the New York City Fire Department, more than eight times the normal rate - the family will call 911, who will send the police. The police will contact the medical examiner's office. At the peak of the virus in the city, it took nearly 24 hours for pickups to be arranged, Zambito told me, when it normally takes only a few hours. She's since noticed a decline in wait times.

Once the NYPD has cleared the body for pickup, the family will try to find a funeral home to prepare the body for burial or cremation. But as the death toll has risen, funeral homes had a harder time meeting the demand for their services. Then, as cemeteries and crematoriums got busier, their services scheduled weeks in advance, funeral homes experienced the challenge of running out of space for incoming bodies. Many became unable to take new cases. On a podcast with Tanya Marsh, a professor at Wake Forest University who specializes in human remains and cemetery law, Cunningham said she was getting calls like, "Can you help us? We keep calling funeral homes and no one can help us?"

"Some of these guys are at such risk, but they're totally committed to being a part of this effort"

Usually funeral directors work with the medical examiner to track down the deceased's doctor, who, in normal times, must sign the death certificate. But for the moment, the need for a doctor's signature has been suspended in New York City.

Funeral homes are also no longer holding viewings or ceremonies in most of New York City. "That's the last time they're going to see that person," Zambito said of families she met during home removals, "and it's the saddest thing ever." When families tell Cunningham that they would typically hold a wake, she reminds them, gently, firmly, that they will never see the body of their loved one again: "Now is your wake."

Another departure from what most would deem a good death is the hospital deaths. To prevent the spread of coronavirus, city hospitals have ended visitations - which means if the ambulance takes you to the hospital and you do not survive, your family will never see your body again. Your body will perhaps be placed, by hospital staff, in one of the refrigerated trucks in back. The hospital will contact your family and your family will contact a funeral home, like Sherman's. A funeral director will check eVital, the electronic service run by the medical examiner, to confirm that your paperwork is in order. Then they will go out to pick up your body.

Bodies are often in white body bags, sometimes orange body bags, the two types the city was able to procure, unless hospitals have run out. When the body is brought back to the funeral home, it is organized in a holding area, labeled and kept cool as the wait for a scheduled burial or cremation begins.

When Zambito says she moved bodies, she means she retrieves from storage those that must be placed in cardboard boxes for cremation or in a casket for burial. But finding the bodies slated for removal can take a while; they're clearly marked, but limited space has required stacking bodies on top of each other. "We wind up having to play Tetris, where we have to move all these other people to get to them," she said. "It's pretty awful, I'll be honest."

When Zambito says she casketed bodies, she means she placed them in their appropriate containers. For half a century, preparing a casketed body for a viewing has been an art: the facial features set, makeup applied, the body carefully dressed in clothes selected by the family. None of that can be done now when the dead threaten to share their disease. "We have to just put them in the casket and drape clothes over them," Zambito told me.

As the crematoriums and cemeteries got backed up in late March and early April - the former were scheduling cremations into late May and the latter were performing as many as 60 funerals a day - funeral homes found they were running out of room to store bodies. Funeral home chapels, no longer accessible to visitors because of physical distancing, became makeshift morgues.

Sherman's installed a refrigerator in its front garden; it was immediately filled with bodies in cardboard boxes waiting for cremation. Briefly, some thought that embalming bodies would help preserve them longer, allowing crematories and cemeteries to catch up with the demand, but the sheer number of bodies became too much for funeral directors to embalm. The bodies came too fast. Within five days, Sherman's staff began placing them wherever they could, including in the hallways.

Casket selections also became depleted. Zambito told me that Sherman's usually gets caskets from one company, but high demand now requires them to source them from wherever they can. "We're getting caskets that were discontinued - close-out caskets," she said.

There's been a shortage of hearses, too, so the livery companies are sending limousines or SUVs. Drivers find they may have to wait hours once they reach the cemetery, the line of vehicles ahead of them snaking through the cemetery's drives.

Cunningham has been trying to convince families, particularly those without the extra funds for an expected funeral right now, to think of Hart Island as a spiritual place. "We can sanctify the grounds and make it okay to be there," she told Marsh. "I can only anticipate that it will be made beautiful and visitable, historic."

When I ask Zambito if she's afraid of getting sick, she says no, but it's clear she's trying not to think about the possibility. When I ask again, "Are you willing to do this job regardless?" she answers, "Absolutely, yeah, yeah." As with many hospital and nursing home workers, those in the funeral industry see the pandemic as a time to pitch in, not duck out.

"So far, no one's sick," Cunningham said of her colleagues, "and I'm amazed that they want to work. ... Some of these guys are at such risk, but they're totally committed to being a part of this effort." As the number of deaths climbed, New York's governor called in funeral directors and ambulances from out of state. In came 150 refrigerated trucks and out went bodies to mass graves on Hart Island.

Despite casket shortages, the long hours, and the grim retrievals, the funeral industry carries on

The industry has not been without its scandals. "We had bodies coming out of our ears," Andrew T. Cleckley, owner of the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, told the New York Times after police found at least 50 corpses in the back of two trucks outside the funeral home the last week of April. Neighbors had reported a pervasive smell and fluids running out of the trucks. Cleckley's funeral director license was valid, but the space, which had been the address for five coordinating funeral homes for two years, was registered for "automobile retail," and "the manufacture of machinery."

Industry associations were aghast. The New York Funeral Directors Association said Cleckley was not a member. According to Time magazine, city health officials immediately issued guidance to all funeral homes. The Cleckley example highlights the challenges the pandemic has presented as well as the inadequacies of government responses to systemic shortfalls caused by Covid-19. Like recommending that all nurses wear face masks but not providing them, government officials are not doing enough to help overwhelmed social services, like funeral homes and the families who rely on them.

Still, despite the casket shortages, the long hours of waiting, and the grim retrieval, the funeral industry carries on, shuffling bodies and delivering them to their final disposition. For now, the number of deaths is declining. Future outbreaks, the full depletion of personal protective equipment reserves, and the long grieving process the city faces loom ahead. Everyone is tired.

"It's hard because you end up working with each individual case and it's so labor-intensive," Cunningham told me.

If you drive north of the city, west of the Hudson, and cross the Wallkill River, you'll find a sleepy little cemetery called Rosendale Plains, which has been around since the late 1800s. The proprietor's name is Floyd Craig; his son Brandon makes pine caskets. This is where Cunningham has been taking bodies. Because of the shortage of hearses, she loads the casket into the back of her Honda Pilot, where she's got 78 inches behind the front seat. She slides in the casket on top of an Oriental rug and plays music - classical, or a playlist provided by families - appropriate to the task of hauling someone's remains to their final resting place. "I make it a funeral," she told me.

It's a reverential task, one that Cunningham, and every funeral director I've spoken to, takes seriously even as the customary rituals are upended for time and space. One of the benefits of Rosendale Plains is the uncommonly low price: A plot there costs $800, and the opening fee, the rate to dig a grave and close it, is only $800. (For comparison, a single plot in Green-Wood Cemetery can cost $12,000.)

The high national rate of unemployment weighs on her. When the body is laid to rest, Cunningham puts one of Brandon Craig's empty pine caskets in the back of the Pilot and heads home. It will be an inexpensive alternative to a standard casket for one of her families. "That's what I've decided will be my contribution," Cunningham told me, referring to the solemn burials in Rosendale Plains, "one body at a time."

Ann Neumann is author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America and a contributing nonfiction editor at Guernica magazine.
Laylah Amatullah Barrayn Support Vox's explanatory journalism is an independent documentary photographer based in New York City. She is the co-author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora.
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox's work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources - particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

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2 funeral directors on how the pandemic has upended the business of death

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Kim Zambito, a 29-year-old funeral director in Brooklyn, is driving, always driving. On April 18, a week after New York City's Covid-19 daily death toll peaked at over 800, she did three house removals, put about six bodies in caskets, and moved at least a dozen more around the funeral home to prepare them for burial the next day.

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What it was like being a grave-digger at Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood cemetery in the midst of COVID-19

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'It's nonstop': Inside the life of a New York City gravedigger during the coronavirus

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In a New York cemetery, the influx of bodies - almost triple pre-coronavirus levels - hasn't let up in weeks.

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This is a great Seattle Times article about what the funeral ban was like in Seattle.

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[UPDATE: Washington Gov. Jay Inslee adjusts ban on funerals]
Funerals postponed. Open-casket viewings by the side of the road. Sitting shiva via Zoom. Cemeteries threatening to turn away families whose faith requires them to climb into the grave and personally lay their dead to rest.

Over the past two weeks, increasingly strict social-distancing rules - culminating in Gov. Jay Inslee's stay-at-home order on March 23 - have sown confusion and consternation among families, cemeteries, faith leaders and funeral directors over a fundamental question:

What to do with our departed loved ones in a new era of enforced isolation?

"The reality is, we still have people dying every day from other causes," said Char Barrett, funeral director at A Sacred Moment. "But my world is pretty much upside-down."

On March 19, the state Department of Licensing (DOL) sent a strict memo to the state's death-care providers, clarifying Inslee's ban on funerals: "Funerals are not permitted at this time. ... cemeteries should restrict interment services to 'delivery only.'"

"Yes, that includes graveside services," said Rob Goff, president of the Washington State Funeral Directors Association.

Even just four or five people, who are kept 10 feet apart?

"Yes," he said. "We have to abide by the law of the land."

For some, that causes intimate family heartbreak. Leonid Torchilo, whose mother died March 20 after a stroke, knew he couldn't give her the funeral she would have wanted at the Light of Hope Ukrainian church in Marysville. It had closed.

Instead, he hoped the immediate family could say goodbye during her burial at Woodlawn Cemetery in Snohomish. But the cemetery, Torchilo said, told him nobody was allowed to come before or during the burial, per state rules - only afterward. Woodlawn Cemetery declined to comment.

So they had a "van viewing" - three cars of family, plus the van carrying Mrs. Torchilo's casket, pulled off the road about a quarter-mile from the cemetery. With the van doors open, family members were allowed a few semi-private, roadside moments to say goodbye.

"It's ridiculous," Torchilo said. "It felt like we were doing something wrong, off in some parking area. I felt like an idiot."

For others, the funeral ban has become a source of communitywide distress.

"It's a heated situation, period"

Victor Fitch has been in the funeral businesses for more than 20 years. Mohamed Sheikh Hassan has been a leader in the East African community for just as long. But a Tuesday burial required some of the most delicate negotiations of their tenures.

The morning after Inslee's stay-at-home directive, Fitch - the president of Dayspring and Fitch Funeral Home - arrived at Woodlawn Cemetery to assist in the burial of a woman from the Somali Muslim community.

It was a tense scene.

Around 100 mourners had gathered, but the cemetery wanted them gone, in accordance with the DOL's "delivery-only" guidelines. Fitch, who has worked with Seattle-area Somali families for many years, knew this would be tricky.

"Muslim funerals are a community event," he explained later. "When someone passes away, whether you knew the person or not, you're encouraged by your faith to attend, to help that person have more blessings."

Fitch called the DOL, which regulates funeral homes and cemeteries, to tell them what was happening.

They gave him two suggestions, he said: "Either reschedule the burial or ... call the sheriff's department." Neither sounded practical. "Do we call the sheriff on our own family right now? You're looking at a community that has been refugees, people we've been serving for two decades."

DOL spokesperson Christine Anthony said the agency had received one phone call from a funeral director facing a large crowd who was "concerned about their personal safety and potentially being exposed to the virus." Fitch disputes this version, saying he called for guidance, not concern for his personal safety.

Meanwhile, Hassan was also running interference. "It was really chaos at the cemetery," he said. "The cemetery owner said: 'I'm not going to allow you to put the body in the grave until all these people go.' "

But burials in that community, he explained, involve scores of people who gather to help: to pray with the family, take the casket from the van, then take the body from the casket and hand it to men who've climbed into the grave to lay the deceased in the soil, with the head pointing toward Mecca.

"There's a lot of manpower that needs to be there," Hassan said. "Allah has told us: 'If any person who has the Muslim faith dies in a city, every Muslim in that city is required to make sure that person is buried properly.' We have obligations as Muslims."

Fitch, Hassan said, was an artful negotiator. He talked most of the crowd off cemetery property and the burial proceeded - though several drifted back onto the grounds to pray.

"What can you do?" Fitch said. "You are ultimately talking about people who love someone and want to be there. You can't fight that on the ground. ... It's a heated situation, period."

Since Tuesday, Hassan said he and other community leaders have been in close contact about how to resolve the funerary tensions, and that Woodlawn Cemetery told another Muslim family it would only perform all-staff burials: no family.

Hassan wonders whether state officials talked to any imams or rabbis - some Jewish congregations also have very hands-on death-care practices - before announcing that "cemeteries should restrict interment services to 'delivery only.' "

"We knew this would affect people deeply in many areas of their lives," Mike Faulk, a spokesperson for Inslee, said. "Many stakeholders were involved; I don't have a list."

Postponed funerals, Faulk added, have affected his life, too. His father's service was scheduled for April 4, in Alabama - but was canceled because of the pandemic.

Supporting the living

Coronavirus restrictions are changing the way we honor the dead - and forcing the living to get creative.

Barrett, of A Sacred Moment, has been a local leader in the home-funeral movement and says that while churches and cemeteries are closed, some families are hosting small, private services at home, with or without the deceased present.

One Pagan family she recently worked with held a small home funeral, streaming a portion of the ceremony on Zoom.

"We're trying to get the word out to people: There's another alternative here," Barrett said. "Do it yourselves in your own home and at least have that goodbye - but be smart about it. You still need to keep that 6-foot social distance."

Nora Menkin, executive director of the People's Memorial Association and The Co-op Funeral Home, who also belongs to a Reform Jewish synagogue in West Seattle, said some death-care providers of the Jewish faith have been recalling a story in the Midrash (a text that includes commentary on the Torah). "It says that if a wedding procession and a funeral procession meet at a crossroads, the wedding procession should go first," she said. "Celebration should go first, life should go first - that means we're prioritizing protecting the living."

Faith-oriented leaders (Rabbi Paula Rose of the Congregation Beth Shalom, Rabbi Benjamin Hassan of the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, Nickhath Sheriff of the Muslim Community Resource Center, or MCRC) say their communities are learning how to balance honoring the dead while supporting the living.

Some Muslims, Sheriff said, are experimenting with digital tools like Zoom and WhatsApp for group prayer and consolation. "The community comes together to give solace to the deceased's soul, pray for forgiveness for the person and comfort the family," she said. "We are trying to balance our religious obligations with the government and city obligations."

Zoom and Google Hangouts are especially useful for sitting shiva in Judaism, the seven-day period of mourning when friends and family visit the home of the bereaved. But Muslim and Jewish leaders agreed that while digital solace gives a taste of support, it's no replacement for hugs and presence.

"It's obviously not the same," Rose said. "Our prayer services involve a lot of song - it's very hard to sing together over Zoom, and that's something that's been a real loss."

Rabbi Hassan quoted the Torah: "'You shall live by them,' 'them' being the laws," he said. "The rabbinical learning interprets this as 'you should not die by them.' In the Jewish community, saving a life is more valuable and more essential than any ritualistic process. But there's only so much cards, emails and Zoom can do."

For now, bathing of the dead - called tahara in Judaism and ghusl in Islam - is continuing, but with heightened safety protocols and personal protective equipment. "Right now, we are treating each body as if it's been infected," Sheriff, of the MCRC, said. "Just for the public safety."

As Christians, Muslims, Pagans and Jews figure out how to proceed with funeral traditions under fraught circumstances, others have simply suspended their plans.

"The cremation rate in Washington is 80%," Goff, of the Funeral Directors Association, said. "It's not uncommon for people to have the cremation and then the gathering weeks or months later."

But that can lead to another species of heartache: limbo. Robin Partington, whose husband died suddenly in September, was planning a celebration of life for March 28 at a farm in Puyallup.

"Spring was his favorite season," she said. "A lot of family from the East Coast was coming - a lot of planning went into making it very special."

She had to postpone. The celebration is rescheduled for July 11, but Partington knows she may have to cancel again. "I understand the restrictions," she said. "But it's also heartbreaking and confusing. It's not just the event itself, but the processing and the connection that goes along with that."

One thing nobody disputes: This coronavirus crisis, and the resultant restrictions on funerals, is tough on everyone, from families to religious communities to state regulators who have to enforce difficult rules.

"This is a learning process," Sheriff said. "We are all trying to do our best in this time of test."

More on the coronavirus outbreak

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Honor the dead, protect the living: Coronavirus-era funeral bans make a tough time even tougher

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UPDATE: Washington Gov. Jay Inslee adjusts ban on funerals] Funerals postponed. Open-casket viewings by the side of the road. Sitting shiva via Zoom. Cemeteries threatening to turn away families whose faith requires them to climb into the grave and personally lay their dead to rest.

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police dance with a coffin to raise awareness of the danger of covid-19

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Peru police dance to raise coronavirus awareness

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Peruvian police officers find a novel way of raising awareness of the dangers of coronavirus.

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Bay Area Mortuary, Funeral Home & Community Chapel, Little Orchard Street, San Jose, CA, USA

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Bay Area Mortuary, Funeral Home & Community Chapel, Little Orchard Street, San Jose, CA, USA

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Bay Area Mortuary, Funeral Home & Community Chapel, Little Orchard Street, San Jose, CA, USA

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Did a few days of work for a local funeral home. The US military should be assisting more with this operation.

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As Morgues Fill, N.Y.C. to Bury Some Virus Victims in Potter's Field

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The number of interments has drastically increased on Hart Island, where for 150 years the city has buried its poor or unclaimed dead.

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Leo F. Kearns Inc. Funeral Homes, Lefferts Boulevard, South Richmond Hill, NY, USA

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Leo F. Kearns Inc. Funeral Homes, Lefferts Boulevard, South Richmond Hill, NY, USA

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Leo F. Kearns Inc. Funeral Homes, Lefferts Boulevard, South Richmond Hill, NY, USA

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The coronavirus crisis is overwhelming New York's system for burying the dead.

Credit... Sarah Blesener for The New York Times

The 40-foot trailer has been there for weeks, parked outside the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home in Queens. Its refrigerator hums in an alley next to a check-cashing establishment. Thirty-six bodies, one atop the other, are stacked on shelves inside.

The funeral director, Patrick Kearns, has barely slept since the day he took charge of them. As he lies awake in the middle of the night, he knows there will be more.

"It weighs on you, having so many cases in your care," he said. "The death rate is just so high, there's no way we can bury or cremate them fast enough."

With more than 18,000 announced fatalities and a total death toll that is almost certainly higher, the coronavirus crisis is the worst mass casualty event to hit New York since the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.

At the height of the outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes - more than 800 per day, or four times the city's normal death rate. And though the daily toll has recently slowed, hundreds of bodies are still emerging each day from private homes and hospitals.

While hospitals bore the initial brunt of the crisis as sick people flooded emergency rooms, the sheer volume of human remains has pushed the system for caring for the dead to its limits, too: Hospital morgues, funeral homes, cemeteries and crematories are all overflowing and backed up.

The scale of the problem was brought into sharp relief on Wednesday afternoon, when the police found dozens of decomposing bodies stashed inside two trucks outside a funeral home on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn. The owner, Andrew T. Cleckley, said he had nowhere else to put them, adding simply: "I ran out of space."

What happened in Brooklyn appears to be an extreme case, and state health officials said on Thursday they would investigate the matter. But in the last two months, funeral home directors have begun to store bodies in viewing rooms and chapels, turning up their air-conditioning systems to avoid decomposition. Some are transporting bodies to other cities and states to be cremated.

Some hospitals ran out of body bags - the city has since distributed 20,000 - and others have used forklifts to transfer piles of corpses into makeshift mobile morgues. So many people have been dying at home that the medical examiner's office has turned to teams of soldiers working around the clock to pick them up.

Cemetery administrators have been scrambling to meet the need for burials, and the city's four crematories are backed up for weeks. To stave off a secondary public health emergency, any bodies left unclaimed for 14 days were, for a time, being buried at a potter's field on Hart Island in the Bronx.

For the families of the dead, the overloaded system has turned the already painful act of mourning into a kind of anxious torture. Some have found it hard to track the bodies of their loved ones as they move from morgue to morgue. Others have had trouble hiring hearses, which are now in high demand.

Because of social distancing rules, wakes are often not permitted, and funerals that once took days to arrange can sometimes now take weeks - if they can happen at all. Even when they do occur, extended families are not supposed to touch one another or get too close as they stand beside a grave.

"We wanted to grieve together, and we weren't able to," said Reginald Teekasingh, whose grandfather was buried by Mr. Kearns. "Nothing was like it should be."

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Funeral directors like Mr. Kearns have found themselves in the middle of a logjam, besieged at one end by constant calls for pickups from hospitals or nursing homes and stymied at the other by an inability to cremate or bury people quickly.

A fourth-generation funeral director, Mr. Kearns, 50, has always thought of himself as "a final responder" to the neighborhoods his family has served since 1900. Some of those communities, like Richmond Hill, Jackson Heights and Corona in Queens, have been among the hardest-hit sections of New York.

In an average month, Mr. Kearns performs some 30 or 40 funerals, but in April alone he expected the number to be about 200. And that, he said, was on top of the 150 more he was asked to do but couldn't because he lacked the energy and equipment. His supply of caskets has at times run short.

Though he has spent his life around death, Mr. Kearns has never seen anything like the coronavirus crisis. Death certificates have been difficult to file; cremation permits have been hard to obtain; and keeping track of the endless wave of bodies has been harrowing.

"My stress levels just keep going up," he said.

On April 17, for instance, Mr. Kearns dispatched two assistants to Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens to retrieve a body, but the person they had been sent to find was not on the correct shelf in the hospital's mobile morgue. Locating the body required hunting through dozens of others in the darkness with a flashlight, comparing names and numbers with the data in their log.

All of this has exacted a toll. In the past few weeks, Mr. Kearns said, he has lost 20 pounds and missed most family dinners. On a recent evening, working in his trailer, he tripped and smashed his head against a shelf. After blacking out, he woke on the floor among the corpses. His wife and business partner forced him to go home.

"I'm looking forward to the end," he said. "That's all I can say."

At most of the city's 50 cemeteries, telephones have been constantly ringing. On the grounds outside, digging crews have been working through the weekends.

"We're swamped - absolutely swamped," said Julie Bose, the president of The Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn, where the number of funerals has tripled. "And that's every day, day in, day out."

The city's four crematories have also backed up. Like other funeral directors, Mr. Kearns has been taking bodies to other cities for cremation. A few weeks ago he reached a deal with a crematory in Schenectady, about 145 miles north of New York City, to avoid the crush downstate.

Anticipating the surge, officials in New York relaxed restrictions on city crematories in late March, allowing them to work around the clock. Each has recently been running at double its capacity. None, however, were accepting new appointments until well into May.

On a recent week, the crematory at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn handled about 130 cases - more than double its typical load. Richard Moylan, the cemetery's president, said that two of his five ovens had broken down from overuse.

"The chambers need a break," Mr. Moylan said, "but as fast as we cremate people, they keep coming in."

It was much the same at the Fresh Pond Crematory in Middle Village, Queens, where the four cast-iron units are handling more than 75 bodies each week, up from the usual 45.

Mr. Cleckley, in an effort to explain how dozens of decomposing bodies ended up in trucks at his funeral home, said one of his drivers had arrived at the gates of a city crematory at 6 a.m. on a recent morning to find 15 vehicles from other funeral homes ahead of him. "People are spending all night at crematories waiting to get seen," he said.

Dan Wright, the secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 813, which represents about 500 funeral service workers in the New York area, put it bluntly: "People are dying faster than we can get them to their final destinations."

Funerals, limited to 10 or fewer people, at times look like a kind of dark ballet. As mourners wait in their cars, crews in masks and gloves put caskets into the ground. Families gather graveside - not too close together - only after the diggers have moved away.

"I don't know how I would have felt if I had to bury my mother under these conditions," said John Blumer, a grave digger at the New Montefiore Cemetery on Long Island. "The body goes down to the ground alone. It's hard for them."

When Cruz Morales, 75, died at a nursing home in the Bronx earlier this month, her son Jose spent nearly a week making calls, looking online and going door to door in an attempt to find a funeral director. With no success, he began to worry that St. Barnabas Hospital, which had claimed his mother's body, would have to send it on to a public morgue.

"My worst fear was that I didn't want my mother's body to be dumped somewhere and then I have to look for her all over the city," Mr. Morales said.

Last week, he finally found someone at the D'Bari Funeral Home on East 188th Street who could help him - or so he thought at first. Mr. Morales, a Pentecostal Christian, wanted his mother to be buried. But the wait for a cemetery plot was far too long, and the staff at D'Bari was only scheduling cremations.

With no other options, Mr. Morales agreed to a cremation, knowing that while he might not get to see his mother off, she would at least be able to rest in peace. "Even though it's not what we hoped for," he said, "I feel so secure."

For Mr. Teekasingh, whose grandfather died of the virus, the hardest part of the process was picking only 10 relatives to attend the burial. The rest of the family had to watch by Skype.

"A lot of us were not able to see him when he passed," he said. "It was not normal."

Near the middle of April, Mr. Kearns got a panicked call from a client. She had just found out, she said, that her father had died from the virus two weeks earlier at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. Was there anything he could do?

Knowing time was short, Mr. Kearns called the hospital and discovered that the man, who had been unclaimed for more than 14 days, had already been scheduled for burial on Hart Island. Mr. Kearns and his team rushed to Montefiore - a race to see if they could beat the transport unit from the medical examiner before it took the man away.

"In the end," Mr. Kearns said, "we were able to get there first."

In normal times, the medical examiner's office would involve itself in a death only if it was sudden, violent or unexpected. But during the pandemic, the office has become the official backstop for an overburdened system.

Dr. Barbara Sampson, the city's chief medical examiner, said that the city had managed to double its capacity for body storage - to about 1,800 - by setting up four portable "disaster morgues," tent-like structures in secluded areas, in addition to its fixed mortuary buildings.

The expansion allowed the office to lift the 14-day deadline for funeral directors to pick up a person's remains before they are sent to Hart Island. Instead of using the potter's field, Dr. Sampson said her agency would soon start letting families freeze the bodies of their loved ones as a "long-term storage option" at the disaster morgues.

"I'm confident," Dr. Sampson said, "that we will have enough capacity to be able to hold people appropriately with dignity and respect until the funeral industry can catch up."

Though officials have declined to say how many coronavirus victims have been buried on Hart Island in recent weeks, the numbers tell the story. Last year, a total of 280 people were buried on the island. This year, 550 people have already been buried there, 450 of them in the past two months alone.

Some hospitals were seemingly caught short by the sheer number of bodies the crisis produced, running low on body bags as their small, in-house morgues filled up. Many were forced to improvise with refrigerated trailers that the city rushed to them.

At Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, one doctor recalled that after a coronavirus patient died in bed, his body lay untouched for six or seven hours. The hospital morgue was already full. There was nowhere else for the man to go.

At St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, the chief executive, Dr. David Perlstein, said the city had told him that no one would come to pick up the bodies until there were 100 in his trailer. To increase capacity, he was advised to build a row of shelves.

Since March, Dr. Sampson's office has distributed roughly 150 refrigerated trailers among the city's roughly 60 hospitals. The medical examiner has also brought on more than 200 soldiers and airmen from the Army, the National Guard and the Air National Guard to bolster its normal mortuary work.

Four-person military teams have been using a fleet of 15 vans, most of them rented, to pick up bodies from private homes when families cannot afford a funeral director or when no next of kin can be determined.

In March and April, the recovery teams picked up 4,729 bodies, more than double the number for the same period last year. Some survivors have reported waiting hours in the presence of the dead for the units to arrive.

Dr. Sampson has also reassigned more than a third of her 800-member work force to front-line jobs, including nearly 200 highly trained scientists from the agency's DNA lab. They are answering phones, conducting investigations and helping out in the morgues.

"We have had to increase every aspect, basically, of what we can do," she said.

Every night at 7, New Yorkers celebrate the city's health care workers with a salute of horns, songs and clanging pots and pans. Nothing similar exists for the grave diggers, cemetery receptionists and funeral directors.

"These people are the hidden heroes of this disaster," said Dr. Emily Craig, who works with a federal database of missing persons. "They work tirelessly."

The only public accolade that Mr. Kearns has gotten came from his daughter, Fiona Kearns. A few years ago, Ms. Kearns worked as a teacher in Missouri, and earlier this month, as the dying reached its peak, some of her friends from the Midwest posted Facebook messages claiming the death rate in New York was overblown.

On April 17, she put up her own message, describing the grueling days and nights that Mr. Kearns was spending with the dead.

"If you would like to look my father up, his name is Patrick Kearns," she wrote. "He is my hero and currently working 16 hours a day."

Edgar Sandoval, Nicole Hong, Ali Watkins and Alexandra E. Petri contributed reporting.

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'We Ran Out of Space': Bodies Pile Up as N.Y. Struggles to Bury Its Dead (Published 2020)

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The coronavirus crisis is overwhelming New York's system for burying the dead. Credit... Sarah Blesener for The New York Times The 40-foot trailer has been there for weeks, parked outside the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home in Queens. Its refrigerator hums in an alley next to a check-cashing establishment.

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Day and night, the dead are delivered into the tawny Amazonian earth - the latest victims of a devastating pandemic now reaching deep into the heart of the Brazilian rainforest.

On Sunday 140 bodies were laid to rest in Manaus, the jungle-flanked capital of Amazonas state. On Saturday, 98. Normally the figure would be closer to 30 - but these are no longer normal times.

"It's madness - just madness," said Gilson de Freitas, a 30-year-old maintenance man whose mother, Rosemeire Rodrigues Silva, was one of 136 people buried there last Tuesday as local morticians set yet another grim daily record.

Freitas - who believes his mother contracted Covid-19 after being admitted to hospital following a stroke - recalled watching in despair as her remains were lowered into a muddy trench alongside perhaps 20 other coffins.

"They were just dumped there like dogs," he said. "What are our lives worth now? Nothing."

The city's mayor, Arthur Virgílio, pleaded for urgent international help.

"We aren't in a state of emergency - we're well beyond that. We are in a state of utter disaster ... like a country that is at war - and has lost," he said.

"It's tragic surrealism ... I can't stop thinking about Gabriel García Márquez when I think about the situation Manaus is facing."

The coronavirus appears to have reached this isolated, riverside metropolis of more than 2 million people on 11 March, imported by a 49-year-old woman who had flown in from London.

Six weeks later it is taking a terrible toll, with gravediggers so overworked that two men were this week forced to bury their own father.

"Manaus is in a race against time to avoid becoming the Brazilian version of Guayaquil," one local newspaper, A Crítica, warned last week in reference to the Ecuadorian city where bodies have been left rotting in the streets and thousands are feared to have died.

With more than 100 people dying each day and Manaus's overwhelmed authorities performing nighttime burials, many fear it is already too late.

Rio's favelas count the cost as deadly spread of Covid-19 hits city's poor

City officials say they expect to bury up to 4,500 people in the next month alone. Funeral homes have warned they will run out of wooden coffins by this weekend.

In Parque Tarumã - Manaus's biggest cemetery - excavators have carved out mass graves called " trincheiras " - trenches - in which the dead were being stacked in three-high piles until a revolt from mourning families saw the practice halted.

"It's chaos in there," said Freitas, whose 58-year-old mother was consigned to the trenches last week. "She spent her whole life working ... she paid all of her taxes. She deserved more. We all do."

Edmar Barros, a local photographer who has been documenting the burials, said he had never seen anything similar. "It's absurd what is happening here," he said. "It's a situation of just devastating sadness."

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A healthcare worker pays tribute to co-workers that have died from Covid-19 in front of the 28 de Agosto hospital in Manaus, on Monday. The sign reads: 'Miss you.' Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Reuters

Emergency and health services in Manaus are also buckling under the strain, with ambulances roaming for up to three hours in search of hospitals with space to admit the patients they have collected.

Gruesome video footage has emerged from hospitals showing corridors lined with corpses shrouded in body bags and sheets. Another video shows an unconscious patient with his head wrapped inside a ventilator hood improvised from a large plastic bag.

"There's a shortage of mechanical ventilators, of oxygen, of staff, of stretchers. Everything is lacking," said Dr Domício Magalhães Filho, the technical director of the ambulance service, Samu.

Experts and officials say multiple factors explain the intensity of the catastrophe affecting the Amazon region's biggest city.

One is that the coronavirus epidemic has struck at the tail end of the rainy season, when respiratory illnesses are rife and hospitals already stretched. Another is that Manaus's chronically underfunded health service was poorly equipped and understaffed even before medical workers began contracting Covid-19 themselves.

But many also blame corruption and the government's failure to effectively implement containment measures once Covid-19 was detected. Only on 23 March - 10 days after the first case was confirmed - did the state governor declare a state of emergency, ordering all non-essential businesses to close.

"We took too long to ask people to stay at home," said Leonardo Steiner, the archbishop of Manaus, which is a four-hour flight north of São Paulo.

Even now, with the death toll soaring, social distancing is being flouted in some areas on the city's outskirts, with huge queues outside banks and locals refusing to wear masks or remain at home.

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Relatives of a coronavirus victim react at the Dr João Lucio Pereira Machado hospital in Manaus last week. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Reuters

"Part of the city seems like it couldn't care less - it's as if nothing is happening," said Barros, the photographer.

The mayor admitted he had failed to keep people indoors but said Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, should shoulder much of the blame for deliberately undermining such measures. "We don't have hurricanes here. We don't have tsunamis. Here the tsunami was having disregarded ... social isolation."

"It saddens me to know these lives could have been saved and weren't saved, in part because Brazil's main leader ... said it was OK to go out," Virgílio added.

Marcia Castro, a Harvard University demographer who specialises in public health in the Brazilian Amazon, said it was unrealistic to expect people to follow health ministry advice when 43% of residents didn't even have access to water to wash their hands. "What this pandemic is doing is throwing wide open the inequalities that have existed for so long," said Castro, whose studies suggest Manaus's health system will collapse further in the coming days.

Of the 5,000-plus Covid deaths officially confirmed in Brazil only 274 have been recorded in Manaus. But the recent surge in burials leaves no doubt the real total is far higher.

'So what?': Bolsonaro shrugs off Brazil's rising coronavirus death toll

Twenty-four hours after Rosemeire Silva's interment, another local woman, 53-year-old Amália Brandão Ribeiro, was rushed unconscious to hospital suffering Covid symptoms - in the front seat of an Uber taxi, since no ambulances were available.

Ribeiro's frenzied arrival was caught on camera - with weeping relatives pleading for help before her lifeless body was eventually hauled inside by staff.

"They never even brought a trolley," said Paula Ribeiro, her daughter.

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Supporters of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, protest against the recommendations for social isolation of the governor of Amazonas Manaus on 19 April. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Reuters

Ribeiro was declared dead soon after, with the cause listed as "unknown". But it was two days before her children could bury her at the Parque Tarumã - one of 128 funerals that day. The confusion was such that officials initially released a man's corpse to her family before the mistake was realized.

Freitas said he knew little of the ailment that had robbed him of his mother.

"It comes from China, doesn't it?" he said vaguely on Tuesday as President Bolsonaro sparked outrage by shrugging his shoulders at the country's dead.

"All of us are afraid because we don't know what tomorrow might bring," Freitas said. "Today we're alive. Tomorrow we just don't know."
Additional reporting by Daylla Kobosque Topics

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'Utter disaster': Manaus fills mass graves as Covid-19 hits the Amazon

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Day and night, the dead are delivered into the tawny Amazonian earth - the latest victims of a devastating pandemic now reaching deep into the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. On Sunday 140 bodies were laid to rest in Manaus, the jungle-flanked capital of Amazonas state. On Saturday, 98.

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New York: A New York City funeral home that resorted to storing dozens of bodies on ice in rented trucks after it was overwhelmed by coronavirus deaths is being investigated by state officials.

An NYPD officer walks up beside rental trucks and a hearse that have their back-ends covered by a tarp outside Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn. Credit:AP

The funeral home in Brooklyn could face civil fines and suspensions after authorities responding to complaints by passersby about a bad smell there on Wednesday found that the home had rented four trucks to hold about 50 corpses, Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said Thursday.

A neighbouring business owner had also called emergency services to report that there were fluids leaking from one of the trucks, police said.

Health officials "have now issued guidance to all the funeral homes that we will not tolerate any of that kind of behaviour," Zucker said at the daily coronavirus briefing by Governor Andrew Cuomo.

"Obviously the funeral home shouldn't have done that," Cuomo said.

The scene was the latest example of funeral homes struggling with thousands of deaths caused by the coronavirus. Credit:AP

Messages were left on Thursday with Andrew T. Cleckley, the owner of the funeral home. He told The New York Times on Wednesday that he needed to use the trucks for overflow storage after he had filled his chapel with more than 100 corpses.

"I ran out of space," he said. "Bodies are coming out of our ears."

The funeral home was initially cited for failing to control the odours before it obtained a larger, refrigerated truck later in the day. Workers suited up in protective gear could be seen on Thursday afternoon transferring bodies into the refrigerated truck.

Mayor Bill de Blasio called the actions of funeral home officials "unconscionable."

"I have no idea in the world how any funeral home could let this happen," the Democrat said at his news briefing, arguing that officials at the home should have asked its state regulators or even city police for help if it was becoming overwhelmed.

The funeral home "should have been able to figure it out," he said.

New York City funeral homes have struggled in the city since late March as the number of fatalities linked to the virus has topped 18,000.

The city set up temporary morgues. Hospitals used refrigerated tractor trailers to cart away multiple bodies at a time, sometimes loading them in public view on the sidewalk.

Crematoriums have been backed up. Funeral directors across the city have pleaded for help as they have run out of space.

Many people working at the funeral homes have expressed "concerns regarding storage," but none as extreme as those reported at the Brooklyn funeral home, Mike Lanotte, spokesman for the New York State Funeral Directors Association, said on Thursday.

Lanotte said the home wasn't a member of the group.

AP

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'Unconscionable' body overflow at Brooklyn funeral home prompts probe

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Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size New York: A New York City funeral home that resorted to storing dozens of bodies on ice in rented trucks after it was overwhelmed by coronavirus deaths is being investigated by state officials.

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At the start of April, 68% of people were concerned or very concerned about their personal health due to the spread of COVID-19.

Almost everyone reported that they were keeping their distance from other people (98%) with many also avoiding public spaces and events (88%) and cancelling plans to gather with friends and family (87%).

At the start of April, 63% of people in Australia over the age of 18 had a job.

One in four people (26%) who had a job in the first week of April worked less hours than usual in the previous week, whilst 13% worked more hours than usual.

About this issue
This publication presents results from the first Household Impacts of COVID-19 Survey, which collected information from 1,059 people, via telephone, throughout Australia between the 31st March and 6th of April 2020.

This iteration of the survey collected information on:

concerns about personal health due to the spread of COVID-19;

health precautions taken in response to COVID-19;

job situation; and

flu vaccination intentions.

The scope of the survey was persons aged 18 years and over in private dwellings across Australia (excluding very remote areas).
It is the first survey in a new series, designed to provide a quick snapshot about how Australian households are faring in response to the changing social and economic environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the time of the survey, a range of initiatives were announced to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and support the economy. These included:

introduction of international travel restrictions;

the first announcement of an economic stimulus package (12 March);

introduction of border control measures for some states and territories;

shutting down of non-essential services and the announcement of a second economic stimulus package (22 March);

social distancing rules and additional shutdown restrictions (21 - 29 March);

JobKeeper payment announcement (30 March); and

free childcare for working parents (2 April).

At the time of this survey, the household economic stimulus payments were in the process of being distributed and information was not collected on how they were used. However, the next release of survey results will contain information about receipt of stimulus payments and how people intend to use them.
Estimates marked with an asterisk (*) have a relative standard error of between 25% and 50% and should be used with caution. For more information about relative standard refer to the publication explanatory notes.

Job situation

The survey collected information on the current (first week of April) job situation of all respondents; the job situation of all respondents four weeks prior (first week of March); and changes in hours worked in the last week for respondents currently with a job.

This survey is intended to provide a snapshot of the changes being experienced by people in Australia due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents were asked simple questions about changes to their job situation, rather than the full suite of employment-related questions included in the ABS' Labour Force Survey (see Questionnaires Used in the Labour Force Survey, cat. no. 6232.0). The results of this survey are, therefore, not directly comparable to Australia's official Labour Force measures. More information about measuring the labour market impacts of COVID-19 can be found here.

The diagram below shows the self-reported change in job situation of people living in Australia aged 18 years and over between the beginning of March and the beginning of April.

Table 1: PERSONS AGED 18 YEARS AND OVER, self-reported job situation

(a) Includes all people without a job and should be considered only a loose approximation for the combined "unemployed" and "not in the labour force" groups.
* Estimate has a relative standard error of between 25% and 50% and should be used with caution

The proportion of Australians who reported they had a job working paid hours decreased from 64% in the first week of March to 56% in the first week of April, while the proportion who reported that they did not have a paid job increased by 3%.

Changes in amount of hours worked

Of the people in Australia aged over 18 who had a job in the first week of April:

12% worked more hours that week than usual due to COVID-19;

24% worked less hours than usual due to COVID-19; and

61% worked about the same amount of hours that week as usual.

Diagram 1: PERSONS AGED 18 YEARS AND OVER, changes in amount of hours worked last week
The flow diagram shows 13% worked more hours than usual, 26% worked less hours than usual, and the remaining 61% worked around the same amount hours. Reasons for working more hours: were COVID-19: 12% and other reason 1%. Reasons for working less hours were COVID-19: 24% and other reason 2%.

Over half (60%) of those with a job who worked less hours in the last week because of COVID-19 said it was due to a reduction in the amount of work available, whilst 15%* said it was because they were stood down by their employer.

Concerns about personal health

Approximately two-thirds of Australians (68%) were concerned or very concerned about their personal health because of the spread of COVID-19.

When broken down by sex:

73% of women were concerned or very concerned for their personal health because of the spread of COVID 19; and

62% of men were concerned or very concerned for their personal health because of the spread of COVID 19.

PERSONS AGED 18 YEARS AND OVER, concerns about personal health due to COVID-19, by sex

When broken down by age:

67% of persons aged 18-64 years were concerned or very concerned for their personal health because of the spread of COVID 19; and

71% of persons aged 65 years and over were concerned or very concerned for their personal health because of the spread of COVID 19.

PERSONS AGED 18 YEARS AND OVER, concerns about personal health due to COVID-19, by broad age groups

Almost nine in ten Australians (87%) reported washing their hands and/or using sanitiser more than usual in the last four weeks due to the spread of COVID-19, while 13% reported washing their hands and/or using sanitiser about the same as usual.

The results were similar for men and women.

PERSONS AGED 18 YEARS AND OVER, whether washing hands and/or using sanitiser more than usual in the last four weeks, by sex

Approximately half of Australians (49%) reported touching their face less than usual in the last four weeks due to the spread of COVID-19, while just under half (45%) reported touching their face about the same as usual.

When broken down by sex:

53% of women reported touching their face less than usual; and

45% of men reported touching their face less than usual.

PERSONS AGED 18 YEARS AND OVER, frequency of face touching in the last four weeks, by sex

Includes persons who did not know whether their frequency of face touching had changed, therefore components may not sum to 100%.

When broken down by age:

53% of persons aged 18 to 64 years reported touching their face less than usual; and

34% of persons aged 65 years and over reported touching their face less than usual.

PERSONS AGED 18 YEARS AND OVER, frequency of face touching in the last four weeks, by broad age groups

Includes persons who did not know whether their frequency of face touching had changed, therefore components may not sum to 100%.

Health precautions

Almost all Australians have taken at least one health precaution in the last four weeks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The most common health precautions taken by Australians were:

keeping distance from people (98%);

avoiding public spaces and public events (88%); and

cancelling personal gatherings (87%).

Similar proportions of women and men took each of the various health precautions.
PERSONS AGES 18 YEARS AND OVER, health precautions taken in the last four weeks(a), by sex

(a) Multiple response option. Respondents may have reported more than one health precaution taken. Components will not sum to 100%. (b) Includes public events. (c) Examples include with friends or family. (d) Including from pop up and fever clinics.

A higher proportion of people aged 65 years and over reported that they were self-isolating than people between 18 and 64 years old. The younger group were more likely to be working and to have children in their care, and were therefore more likely than those aged 65 and above to be working from home and keeping children home as precautions.

PERSONS AGES 18 YEARS AND OVER, health precautions taken in the last four weeks(a), by broad age groups

: (a) Multiple response option. Respondents may have reported more than one health precaution taken. Components will not sum to 100%. (b) Includes public events. (c) Examples include with friends or family. (d) Including from pop up and fever clinics.
* Estimate for persons aged 65 years and over has an RSE between 25% and 50% and should be used with caution.

Flu vaccination

Health authorities have recommended that all Australians aged 6 months and older should receive flu vaccinations this year to reduce the risk of contracting the flu and COVID-19 at the same time. Go to www.health.gov.au for more information.

Approximately one in ten people living in Australia aged over 18 (2.2 million or 11%) have already had a flu vaccination this year. Of these:

82% said they usually have a flu vaccination; and

15%* said they had the flu vaccination due to the spread of COVID-19 only.

Of the remaining 17.2 million Australians who have not had a flu vaccination this year:

71% (12.3 million) intend to have a flu vaccination this year; and

29% (4.9 million) do not intend to have a flu vaccination this year.

Of the 12.3 million Australians who have not had a flu vaccination this year but intend to have one:

27% (3.3 million) intend to have a flu vaccination because of COVID-19 only; and

73% (8.9 million) intend to have a flu vaccination for other reasons.

Changes or cancellation of travel plans
Approximately half of all Australians (52%) reported having to change or cancel their travel plans during March due to the spread of COVID-19.

In terms of domestic or international travel, of those who changed or cancelled their travel plans:

57% changed or cancelled domestic travel only;

26% changed or cancelled international travel only; and

17% changed or cancelled both domestic and international travel.

In terms of work-related or personal travel, of those who changed or cancelled their travel plans:

3% changed or cancelled work-related travel only;

90% changed or cancelled personal travel only; and

7% changed or cancelled both work-related and personal travel.

What's next?
The ABS followed up with people involved in this survey between 14th and 16th April. Topics covered in this second iteration of the household survey included:

Current job situation compared to 1 week ago;

How stimulus payments were used;

Financial and psychological stress measures; and

Communication with friends and family.

Information from this second survey will be released in early May.
The ABS would like to thank all participants for their involvement in the survey. The information collected is of value to inform government and community responses to the COVID-19 outbreak.

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4940.0 - Household Impacts of COVID-19 Survey, 1-6 Apr 2020

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At the start of April, 68% of people were concerned or very concerned about their personal health due to the spread of COVID-19. Almost everyone reported that they were keeping their distance from other people (98%) with many also avoiding public spaces and events (88%) and cancelling plans to gather with friends and family (87%).

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2 Brothers Died of Covid. They're Being Denied Their Last Wish.

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More than 250 Mexican immigrants have died from the virus in the New York area. Many of them longed to be buried in their birthplace.

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A Good Death Is a Rite of Irish Life. Amid Coronavirus, That Looks Different.

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In Ireland, wakes and funerals typically involve entire communities. But social distancing is changing how those rituals play out.

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Perches Funeral Homes - West, South Desert Boulevard, El Paso, TX, USA

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Perches Funeral Homes - West, South Desert Boulevard, El Paso, TX, USA

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Perches Funeral Homes - West, South Desert Boulevard, El Paso, TX, USA

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EL PASO, Texas -- Burying a family member could be one of the hardest things one can do.

Burying someone during a pandemic can prove to be even more difficult, and now El Paso's Operation Hope is working to help those in need.

It's a heartbreaking story to tell. A day after Easter - a 2-year-old boy chokes on a toy, now his family has to bury him.

The family has opted to have a drive-by visitation.

"Basically they drive by and pay their respects," said Jorge Ortiz, general manager at Perches Funeral Home.

He tells ABC-7 that families have been willing work around the circumstances caused by the pandemic.

"They have told us that this is giving them a lot of comfort, that we're offering this services," Ortiz said.

"Operation Hope has always been a part of our community, we're a hundred percent volunteer and a hundred percent donation and every time there's a need we always step up," said Ruby Gomez, a co-founder of Operation Hope.

The organization is helping families who have lost their loved ones due to Covid-19.

"If the families are affected by the Covid-19 crises, that's going on right now, they can contact us directly through Operation Hope," Gomez said.

Sunset, Perches and Mt. Carmel funeral homes are now working together with Operation Hope to offer reduced prices.

"The fact that there are so many families that are not working, that do not have an income, so these funeral homes are stepping up to make it easier for them during these difficult times," Gomez said.

Perches is also providing live streaming on the internet of funeral services.

You can contact Operation Hope at 915-590-0490.

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Funerals during the virus pandemic: Operation Hope helps to honor the dead - KVIA

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EL PASO, Texas -- Burying a family member could be one of the hardest things one can do. Burying someone during a pandemic can prove to be even more difficult, and now El Paso's Operation Hope is working to help those in need. It's a heartbreaking story to tell.

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This piece is a collective effort by an international group of scholars and practitioners in the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement. Our Public Health sub-group, Lauren Breen of Australia, Daisuke Kawashima of Japan, David Roth of Germany, Amy Chow of Hong Kong, Mary Ellen Macdonald, Karima Joy and Susan Cadell, all of Canada, recently published a paper on grief literacy. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been thinking a great deal about grief in this context. With the advent of COVID-19, we have co-written this piece about grief in the pandemic.

So much is being lost in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. We have lost our routines and many freedoms. Many people have lost their jobs. We have lost the ability to visit freely with one another and, in some cases, to go outside our homes. And some people have lost their lives while others have lost the opportunity to be with people who are dying or grieving.

Grief is a normal and natural response in this time. Grief is a response to loss that affects our physical, emotional, behavioral, social, financial, and spiritual lives. It does not only occur in response to death; any loss can cause us to grieve.

Social context plays a huge role in our experience of loss. "We live in communities and societies that are becoming increasingly fragmented." This is how we began our recent article on grief literacy in the journal, Death Studies. We are now at risk of further fragmentation. We need new ways to stay connected with others at this time.

Grief literacy provides a way forward. Grief literacy calls on all of us to be better acquainted with grief so that we can support ourselves and one another. We define grief literacy as the capacity to access, process, and use knowledge regarding the experience of loss. This is a capacity we all need in the midst of this pandemic.

Grief literacy extends the compassionate communities movement. The idea of compassionate communities is to challenge the professionalization of health care and palliative care by empowering communities to care for their citizens. One of the key elements is equity: everyone should have access to quality care at the end of life. The compassionate communities movement harnesses the assets of each community in order to facilitate increased awareness and conversations about death and dying.

While there are burgeoning movements that increase death literacy, these sometimes forget grief. Death cafes, for instance, have explicit instructions excluding active grieving. The compassionate communities movement is expanding into schools and workplaces and focusing on grievers as well as those who are dying. For instance, festivals like To Absent Friends invite people to share their grief stories. Greater grief literacy would enhance these kinds of events and opportunities.

The public health model of bereavement support further provides guidance for increasing grief literacy. To begin, it acknowledges that only a small percentage of the population of those who are grieving are at risk of 'complicated grief,' and therefore in need of specialized counselling. Further, the model demonstrates how 100% of people who are grieving can benefit from more information about grief and loss and compassionate, non-judgmental social support from family, friends, and community.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, we may feel grief at not being able to be at the bedside of someone who is dying. Many hospitals have forbidden visitors during this outbreak. So, even if the patient is dying from another illness besides COVID-19, their family and friends are unable to visit and accompany their death.

We may also feel grief because we cannot engage in familiar rituals when someone dies. We may not be able to hold or attend funerals. When able to attend, the need to distance may prevent people from touching others in order to seek and express support. Palliative care, community organizations and online resources are beginning to emerge with suggestions on how to manage this circumstance. More resources are appearing daily.

Feelings of grief may be exacerbated by social isolation. If someone died before the pandemic occurred, the person who is now grieving may no longer have access to their community. Grievers typically find solace in their routines of work and faith communities. These may no longer be available to them. People literally cannot reach out and touch someone so it is hard to support someone who is grieving.

So what can we do in the time of COVID-19 to be more grief literate and support one another?

First and foremost, be aware of your own experience. It is okay not to be okay. Knowledge of grief is a key aspect of grief literacy. Grief takes many forms and is unique from person to person. It does not have stages. People who are grieving can have oscillating feelings that can feel like a roller coaster or waves. Just like when we are advised to put on our own oxygen mask before helping others, it is important to understand your own experience before seeking to support someone else.

The notion of grief literacy also includes skills. Some of the skills needed are compassionate listening, being able to ask questions in a sensitive manner, and being able to help individuals needing support to find resources. When we listen, we do not need to fix or minimise grief. We need to be able to ask about the feelings and experiences of those who are grieving even when it is painful for us to hear. Grief is painful. Knowledge about grief and our own experience of it can aid us in knowing where to access resources when other grievers are requesting that assistance. Not everyone needs professional help. A supportive friend who really listens can be so helpful.

Values and ethics are also important in grief literacy. Humans are relational beings with responsibilities for one another. We all care for and receive care in our lives. There will always be a need for a health care system, but this system may be stretched or even overloaded at this time. The compassionate communities movement, along with the concept of grief literacy, calls for some of this care to be provided in the community.

In these changed times, we need to reach out in old and new ways. We can continue to write letters and cards and send packages in the mail. We may need to connect via text, call, videochat, or social media. No one can fix grief but we can offer our attention and time to reduce the isolation that is felt when grieving.

It may be necessary to attend or view virtual funerals online. It may not be the same as being present but can bring solace to both you and the grieving family and friends. You can find a personal way to honour the memory of the person and demonstrate to those who are grieving that you have not forgotten the person who died. If you are able, you can make a donation to a charity of choice in honour of the person. You could create something that you keep to remind you of the person who died and you could share it with someone else grieving by sending a photo or video of the creation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced some lovely examples of adapted ways of honouring others. Chalk messages on sidewalks have been created as messages of hope; they could also be used for neighbours to express support for one another in grief. People have lined the roads, all at safe distances from one another, when a grieving family has driven by. In Ireland, the whole country has adopted a campaign to Shine A Light to honour health care providers as well as those who have died.

There are many examples, predating this pandemic, of people honouring the memory of someone by creating scholarships, getting memorial tattoos, creating art, and writing. There are also many examples of positive movements in response to this pandemic. Now, with our limited ability to be together in person, is a good time to be creative in how we remember those who have died and provide support for those who grieve them. One of the lasting legacies of this pandemic can be an increased ability to support one another in our grief.

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This piece is a collective effort by an international group of scholars and practitioners in the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement. Our Public Health sub-group, Lauren Breen of Australia, Daisuke Kawashima of Japan, David Roth of Germany, Amy Chow of Hong Kong, Mary Ellen Macdonald, Karima Joy and Susan Cadell, all of Canada, recently published a paper on grief literacy.

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The New York Police Department detained photographer George Steinmetz last week and seized the $1,500 drone he had been using to document Hart Island, where the city has been burying unclaimed bodies of New Yorkers who died of COVID-19.

In New York City, it is illegal to launch or land aircraft, including drones, outside of designated airfields, but Steinmetz claims he took off from a sleepy parking lot on City Island in the Bronx and only flew half a mile over the water to Hart Island, avoiding LaGuardia's airspace.

A representative of the NYPD told Artnet News that "drones are illegal to fly in New York City except for authorized areas. The areas approved for flying drones are very limited and set by the [Federal Aviation Authority]."

But Steinmetz believes the police's concern "was not about public safety," he told Artnet News. "It is clear to me that the the city was using this law as a pretext to stop people from photographing what was going on on Hart Island."

Inmates from Rikers Island jail have been digging graves on Hart Island, the city's potter's field to bury the bodies of New Yorkers whose families could not be reached to claim them. As the death toll overwhelmed city morgues, many victims of the coronavirus have been sent to Hart Island for internment.

"It's a mass grave," said Steinmetz. "I think it's very embarrassing for the De Blasio administration that they're treating the city's poor like toxic waste."

An accomplished aerial photographer whose work often appears in National Geographic, Steinmetz previously photographed New York City from helicopters and rooftops for his 2015 book New York Air: The View From Above. With the publication of his latest book, The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene, which came out earlier this month, he was inspired to take to the skies once again with an eye toward documenting the streets of New York during the unprecedented shutdown triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.

"I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to look at the city in lock down, the city in paralysis from the air?" Steinmetz said. The results-slightly delayed because his regular helicopter pilot contracted coronavirus-offer a remarkable contrast to earlier photographs of bumper-to-bumper traffic and crowds in public spaces like Bryant Park.

"The avenues are empty, the bridges and tunnels are empty. It looks like a futuristic movie, like Planet of Apes or something," said Steinmetz. "It's like a dead city."

Although he's a licensed drone operator, Steinmetz had never used one in the city before-"Manhattan is not a good environment for a drone," he said. But since his helicopter ride was in the afternoon, to show the great contrast with normal rush hour traffic, he reasoned that a quick drone outing at dawn, when internments take place on Hart Island, seemed harmless enough given that the island has more in common with a quiet New England fishing town than bustling Manhattan.

But about 15 minutes later, undercover police officers descended and confiscated his drone (though he removed the memory card first).

Later that afternoon, Steinmetz approached again via helicopter, but air traffic control refused to give permission to approach Hart Island below 1,000 feet-even though he says he had seen a channel 11 news chopper hovering at about 300 feet that morning prior to his drone flight. "It seemed like word was out they didn't want press," Steinmetz said. "It was very odd."

Jason Kersten, a spokesperson for the Department of Correction, which oversees the Hart Island and its operations, cited "a longstanding policy of not permitting photography of an active burial site from Hart Island," telling Gothamist "it is disrespectful."

Steinmetz received a summons to appear in court in 90 days from the incident.

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This Aerial Photographer Captured Images of the Mass Burials on Hart Island. Then, the NYPD Confiscated His Drone

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The New York Police Department detained photographer George Steinmetz last week and seized the $1,500 drone he had been using to document Hart Island, where the city has been burying unclaimed bodies of New Yorkers who died of COVID-19.

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Hi I'm Stephanie Longmuir and I lead non traditional funeral services in Melbourne.  This is how things have unfolded in my work over the past few weeks.

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María Felícitas Infante Zamora and her siblings were told by Texas prison officials last week that their father, Bartolo Infante, had died. Infante, 72, had been in prison since 2000 for a sexual assault.

But the family only learned that he had tested positive for Covid-19 from a news article they came across on Facebook days later.

marshall project

Then came another blow. Infante's relatives could not afford to hold their own funeral, so the Texas department of criminal justice (TDCJ) said it would bury him at a prison cemetery. But the family would not be able to attend the burial on Thursday because gatherings put people at increased risk of contracting or spreading the virus.

"They said: 'We're just going to give you a picture of him and that's it,'" Zamora said. The picture would be of her father's body at his funeral.

Infante was incarcerated in the Barry B Telford Unit, near the Arkansas border, but will be buried at a prison cemetery in Huntsville, roughly 150 miles from Lockhart, where Zamora and her mother live.

They are not alone. Families across the US, and around the world, have been unable to be with their loved ones when they die, unable to attend funerals and unable to grieve with family and friends.

A TDCJ spokesman, Jeremy Desel, said he had no specific information about why the family was told they could not attend the funeral, but pointed out that outside of prisons, many funerals have been postponed as state and local governments ban public gatherings to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
'It's grief upon grief': the harsh reality of funerals in lockdown
At least 63 people in state and federal custody have died from the coronavirus, according to data collected by the Marshall Project, which reached eight families who lost someone in prison. Some are still wrangling with prison officials to obtain the bodies of their loved ones and to learn basic information about their final days.

Given the massive number of elderly prisoners around the country, deaths are hardly rare in federal and state prisons, as well as jails. And even under normal circumstances, the death of an incarcerated family member is often shrouded in secrecy. For those who have no known next of kin or no family willing to handle arrangements, every state and county has its own protocol for handling remains. In New York City, the unclaimed are buried in mass graves on Hart Island in the Bronx.

When a prisoner is hospitalized, state and federal prison officials sometimes inform their relatives. But several families said officials would not provide hospital information, so they could not directly ask about the course of treatment or prognosis. Officials have also been criticized for exacerbating the trauma of families by leaving voicemails informing them of their relatives' death.

They said: 'We're just going to give you a picture of him and that's it'

María Felícitas Infante Zamora

A lack of information has frustrated Kathy Wilson, the wife of James Wilson, who died on 29 March at the federal prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, after testing positive for Covid-19 and suffering respiratory failure. Wilson said her husband "seemed fine" when they spoke a few days before his death. She is furious that she was never informed that he was severely ill. "Somebody there could have taken five minutes to call and tell me," she said.

When someone dies in prison, even without a pandemic, some families struggle for years to gain insight into their final days. Coronavirus has erected more barriers in their search for answers. Testing is limited in many facilities, and many family members say officials have not done enough to prevent the virus from spreading behind bars.

Eddie James may never find out if coronavirus killed his son. Ricky James died at Mid-State correctional facility in Fort Dix, New Jersey, on 3 April. James says the week before his son died, he had called his girlfriend several times to say he was sick and worried that his incessant coughing and chills were symptoms of coronavirus.

But according to James, the prison refused to test his son even after he died. He says officials told the family that the medical examiner determined that his son died from heart disease. But James is skeptical. His son was 36 when he died.

James looked into having an independent autopsy to determine the cause of death, but it proved too expensive: it would have cost $5,600 on top of the $12,000 he spent to bury his son.

Nineteen guards and five prisoners at the New Jersey facility where James died have tested positive for coronavirus as of 15 April, according to an online dashboard posted by the New Jersey department of corrections.
US jails will become death traps in the coronavirus pandemic | Jean Casella and Katie Rose Quandt
The first guards tested positive on 1 April, according to a spokesperson for the department. The spokesperson would not confirm whether James was tested for coronavirus, saying that "an incarcerated person's medical record is confidential, even in death".

James is making the funeral arrangements from his home in California. But he won't be able to attend the service. Flying into New Jersey, where more than 2,800 people have died from coronavirus, is too risky. But he hopes the funeral home will stream the service so he can watch online.

Olivia Garcia first heard that her father was sick from a family member of someone incarcerated with her father, Margarito Garcia-Fragoso, at FCI Elkton in Ohio. Garcia-Fragoso died on 2 April.

Being separated from her family while mourning her father is "the hardest part" of the whole ordeal, Garcia said.

"His family is not going to have the closure that we all need," she said. "We can't even have a gathering here and support and hug one another because we have to be careful ourselves."
Topics This story was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a not-for-profit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

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Nicole Lewis and Maurice Chammah for the Marshall Project

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Why families of dying prisoners are unable to say last goodbyes

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María Felícitas Infante Zamora and her siblings were told by Texas prison officials last week that their father, Bartolo Infante, had died. Infante, 72, had been in prison since 2000 for a sexual assault. But the family only learned that he had tested positive for Covid-19 from a news article they came across on Facebook days later.

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Hosts of "death cafes" are reporting a global surge in demand for honest conversation about "the nitty-gritty of dying", and say the coronavirus pandemic has made frank discussion about our mortality more necessary than ever.

"In these difficult times, as death comes closer, it's very important to have a forum to talk about our fears and anxieties," says Sue Barsky Reid, a psychotherapist who chaired the UK's first death cafe in 2011 and now coordinates, with her daughter Jools, the international movement that has established more than 10,000 similar meetings in 70 countries over the past decade.

She adds that hosts around the world have quickly moved events online as interest grows in the social franchise, which brings together strangers in an accessible, respectful and confidential space to reflect both on the finite nature of life and also how they might best plan for its ending.

Nicole Stanfield, organiser of the Taunton, Somerset, death cafe, held two online events over a recent weekend and welcomed virtual visitors from across England as well as one from France: "It was amazing to see the geographical spread. I've been surprised by the amount of interest, but people are looking for answers. We're only going to see more death during this pandemic, so people are suddenly thinking about living wills, advanced care discussions and funeral planning."

Hosts in the US describe a similar online effect, despite the physical restrictions of lockdown. "People are being forced to face their own mortality every waking moment," reports Megan Sipe-Mooney, who organises cafes in Missouri. "There's a huge need right now and I'm getting lots of requests on our Facebook page. I've been training other hosts in how to host virtual death cafes and make sure tea, coffee and cake is still present."

The reference to cake is not flippant: proper refreshments are fundamental to the relaxed and often upbeat atmosphere that death cafes aim for, and which marks them out from a more traditional counselling or educational setting.

Death cafes have become a global phenomenon, spreading across Europe, North America and Australasia since Jon Underwood held his first one in September 2011 at his home in Hackney, east London, chaired by his mother Sue. Underwood - a web developer and Buddhist who died suddenly in 2017 - had been inspired by the Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, whose stated mission was to liberate death from an atmosphere of "tyrannical secrecy".

Conversations have become far more practical since the outbreak, explains Aly Dickinson, a death cafe host based in Exeter. "People are realising that deaths during this pandemic won't be what they might have envisaged, or thought of as a so-called 'good death' - gently slipping away, surrounded by family and friends. So the conversations are about how death from Covid might look now - for example, people may decide they do not want to be hospitalised and receive invasive medical interventions or face restricted visiting from loved ones."

Dickinson has been involved with half a dozen cafes since the pandemic began, in her role as secretary of End of Life Doula UK, a membership organisation for death doulas, who provide non-medical support to those with a terminal diagnosis.

"They want to discuss the nitty-gritty, like: will I be able to get out to register the death, could we have a wake remotely, how do we share grief and memories when we're apart? People are wanting hard facts and information about what dying of Covid-19 is actually like. Maybe there's not quite so much laughter, as the mood is more serious."

With cafes also planned in Australia, Canada, Japan, Denmark and beyond throughout April, some hosts suggest that the gradual embrace of online meetings will allow death cafes to extend their support even further.

"We've talked in the past about how nobody wants to discuss death and dying", Dickinson adds, "and suddenly that conversation is right in front of us, in the media and also our own families and communities. So at the death cafes that have taken place since the pandemic, the biggest change is that people are talking about death in a here-and-now way, rather than as something distant."
Topics

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Death cafes report surge of interest since Covid-19 outbreak

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Hosts of "death cafes" are reporting a global surge in demand for honest conversation about "the nitty-gritty of dying", and say the coronavirus pandemic has made frank discussion about our mortality more necessary than ever.

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A woman in Victoria says she was left feeling "heartbroken" and like a criminal after uniformed police officers carrying weapons interrupted her father's funeral over the Easter long weekend to enforce social distancing rules.

It comes as state police forces rapidly escalate the number of people fined for breaching public health orders despite falling infection rates, and amid concerns from law and justice experts the laws are being inconsistently and arbitrarily enforced.

Helen Kolovos, who buried her father on Saturday, says she was "inconsolable" after two police officers entered the church and began counting the number of people attending the funeral as her father's coffin was carried down the aisle.
Civil liberties concerns over Australian police powers to issue fines for coronavirus rule breaches
Funerals have been strictly limited to 10 guests since March, part of the government's strict social distancing measures introduced to slow the spread of Covid-19 in Australia.

"Being from a Greek family it was already mission impossible to do that, but we did, we literally had to pick and choose our own family and say you can come, you can't come," Kolovos told the Guardian.

It was just totally disrespectful, to carry a gun in a Greek church, it's totally against our religion

Helen Kolovos

Despite living in the same house, Kolovos and her family sat in separate pews during the service. Then, at the end of the service, two police officers entered the church as her father's coffin was being carried out.

"To see the police come in at that moment, it broke my heart into a million pieces," Kolovos said.

"It was just totally disrespectful, to carry a gun in a Greek church, it's totally against our religion. But the way they came in, they didn't bow their heads or anything. They just started speaking to some of the people who were working in the church and taking notes as we're carrying out my dad.

"Just pause what you're doing for one moment, bow your head, just give that man a little shred of respect. I was inconsolable. That whole moment of farewelling my dad, that moment was taken away from me."

Since March a string of public health orders issued by health ministers have re-shaped Australian life, giving police unprecedented power to control almost all aspects of everyday movement.

In most states officers now have the power to fine or arrest people caught gathering in groups of more than two, or for being outside of their homes without a "reasonable excuse".

And yet as the rate of infection from Covid-19 in Australia continues to fall, the number of fines issued by police has rapidly increased. By 5 April, Victoria Police had issued 199 fines for breaches of the orders. In the eight days since, they've issued another 931. In the same period the state recorded only 146 new Covid-19 cases.

In New South Wales, police have fined 464 people and issued 57 court attendance notices for breaches of public health orders since 17 March. On Monday the NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller said more than 155 of those had been issued over the Easter long weekend.

"I don't expect those numbers will continue," he said. "But this is an example that some people just aren't listening to the warnings."

Governments say the measures are necessary to control the spread of Covid-19, and that officers use "common sense" in enforcing the restrictions but a Guardian callout for readers' examples of police interactions found dozens of examples of inconsistent, heavy-handed or over-the-top policing.

Last week, George Tomo drove a few kilometres from his home in Wollongong, south of Sydney, to Port Kembla where the infamous Ruby Princess cruise ship was docked. Two weeks ago he lost his job installing lifts, making the 39-year-old one of the hundreds of thousands of Australians to find themselves newly unemployed in the wake of Covid-19. After days spent staring at his computer screen and applying for jobs, he'd left the house to buy a coffee and smoke a cigarette.

"It was just for a bit of sanity" Tomo told the Guardian.

"I've been trying to do the right thing. I don't go outside, I don't go visiting people. But I'm losing my mind in here. I've been working since I was 14. It's the first time I've been laid-off and it's hard sitting at home."

As he sat in his car smoking and looking out at the cruise ship and the locals fishing from the harbour, Tomo was approached by a police officer who asked him why he was there.

"I told him the truth. I said I was here to enjoy the view and see the boat while I had my coffee but I have no intention of leaving my car," he said.

Tomo was told he would be fined $1,000 for not having a valid reason for being outside of his home.

"His exact words to me were, 'if you want to keep doing this, it's a good way to get poor'," he said.

"I don't want to cause a scene or argue with the police because who knows what could happen. I copped it sweet but I was really upset. I've never broken the law in my life. He could have easily just told me to go home and I would have. I've just lost my job, I'm trying to pay a mortgage, it's the last thing I need."

NSW police later said Tomo had been issued with a warning, but no fine was processed.

In other cases, police appear to have used unnecessary force or to have issued heavy fines in cases where there were concerns for the person's welfare.

We need to live restricted lives for at least six months - police enforced lockdowns are unnecessary | Peter Collignon

On Saturday, police fined two men in Condell Park in south-west Sydney who were spotted "eating pizza" in a car. On Monday, News Corp reported video footage which showed 10 officers at the scene. One of the men was in handcuffs.

On the same day in Newcastle, a 47-year-old became one of the first to be hit by a new law which allows police to issue a $5,000 fine to people who spit at healthcare workers.

Police had been called after the woman was seen exposing herself to a light rail vehicle. When they arrived, officers called paramedics because they were "concerned for her welfare". When she was being placed onto a gurney, she spat at a paramedic.

Sydney lawyer Peter O'Brien, who specialises in civil cases against police, said the broad discretion the orders gave officers meant their enforcement was "arbitrary".

"Reasonable minds may differ very significantly on what a 'reasonable excuse' is and when you're leaving it to young police officers on the beat to decide what's reasonable it is almost going to be arbitrary in the way it's going to be applied," he said.

"These laws are going to manifest in the same way as all police powers tend to: in a concentration of the use of power against the already vulnerable, the mentally ill, the people who are already over-policed."
Do you know more? Contact michael.mcgowan@theguardian.com Topics

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'Totally disrespectful': police interrupt funeral while enforcing social distancing rules over Easter weekend

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A woman in Victoria says she was left feeling "heartbroken" and like a criminal after uniformed police officers carrying weapons interrupted her father's funeral over the Easter long weekend to enforce social distancing rules.

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Sao Paulo: Ahead of an anticipated and dreaded peak of the national COVID-19 epidemic, Brazil has begun digging large-scale graveyards.

In Sao Paulo's Vila Formosa cemetery, the largest in Latin America, about 20 excavators are digging against the clock.

An aerial view of Vila Formosa cemetery as excavators open extra graves amid the coronavirus pandemic. Credit:Getty Images

In the space of a few days, the scene of workers digging painstakingly with shovels has changed to that of operators in masks and white overalls at the controls of heavy machinery.

The calm and silence of the Vila Formosa cemetery, where the remains of 1.5 million people are estimated to rest, is broken by the noise of the hydraulic excavators that on Friday started to dig around 1200 new graves.

For this they have released a new lot of land "as a precaution", one of the gravediggers of the municipal funeral service said.

The city of Sao Paulo, with some 12 million inhabitants, has been hardest hit in the country by the coronavirus crisis, with 643 deaths and almost 9000 cases since February 26 when the first was registered in the country.

The public health system is approaching its limit with several city hospitals close to having all their intensive care beds occupied.

The so-called curve has begun to accelerate in recent weeks, with the peak of the pandemic in the country expected in May or June, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Health.

Across the country, COVID-19 deaths are nearing 2500 and cases approaching 40,000.

Major cities in Brazil also saw protests on Saturday by hundreds of people denouncing pandemic lockdown measures also opposed by President Jair Bolsonaro, a fierce critic of stay-at-home measures imposed by state governments.
EFE, AP

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Brazil digging large-scale graves ahead of coronavirus peak

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Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Sao Paulo: Ahead of an anticipated and dreaded peak of the national COVID-19 epidemic, Brazil has begun digging large-scale graveyards. In Sao Paulo's Vila Formosa cemetery, the largest in Latin America, about 20 excavators are digging against the clock.

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Personal Ritual, Outdoor Funerals and Drivebys: Farewells in the time of Pandemic

A woman died in her mobile home, alongside the upper reaches of the Yarra river --  a place where the water tumbles clean and fresh close to Mt Donna Buang.

Her family settled on an outdoor funeral by the river, in a clearing surrounded by willows and gums, close to the chair  where she'd spent her afternoons, right next to the water's edge.

It was a strange and unsettling experience for me as a funeral director and celebrant, to plan a funeral and ceremony over the phone - not being able to feel the weight and heft of grief as it moved through a family, catching the form of it, see where it snagged between individuals, noting the questions to reframe, the most sensitive path through the fog of that time after a person's dying.

We conducted the whole arrangement from our places of isolation - the usual flurry of calls and messages doubling, then tripling as the intricacies of the ceremony, location, and government policies and laws weighed in and really hit home.

On the day, which threatened rain, we arrived separately, the hearse driver bringing her beautiful wicker coffin and then retreating, lest he take up one of the coveted 10 spots at the gathering.

The folk living in this park were, like many of their kith and kin seeing out their days in other caravan parks as permanent residents; they didn't really care for the strident bureaucracies of the hour. For them, someone precious had gone, and they wanted to pay their respects.

I had half expected this, but yet found myself wrung in knots when I had to shepherd people from the space. There was a palpable sense of tongue-biting, rattled breathing and wistfulness that passed between me, the stranger who turned up and started saying how it was going to be, and them, the ones who'd lost a mate.

The outdoor space was so vast that they trickled down the back way and stood at 15m intervals way back near the bank of the river. Some wore suits, suits you could tell they hadn't put on in years. They were so far away that when I checked the requirements again, I couldn't see how this was a breach, as they trailed in single units 200m away from the funeral space. I resolved to let that go to the keeper.

Close to the front, the inner circle of 9 mourners sat on chairs placed at the appointed 1.5m distance from the next.

I chose to forego a microphone, worried about the risks of using one and then handing it to another speaker, but we had music playing, and a slideshow run off a generator.

I spoke in my loudest, clearest voice. Somehow I wanted to bring those riverbank dwellers in, even though we were pretending they weren't there really. The other speaker addressed his words to her coffin, and his simple turn of phrase began weaving gold into the cracks her sudden passing left splintered and open.

Each person sat alone in their chair, little islands of sorrow. Two people who were isolating together huddled close. Some shook silently. Every impulse screamed to comfort, to touch, to soothe with my present, but I stood back.

At the end of the ceremony, people came forward one at a time and laid their hands on a cloth we had placed over the coffin, to protect the hearse driver from any contact with the coffin itself. Most of the people by the banks melted away.

The woman's sister was rocking in her seat, I motioned to her to come forward. As she did the grief rose like a sudden whitecap and shook her on her feet. She pitched forward and without thinking I stepped in to steady her. She both melted into my touch, and yet bucked from the coffin.

"It isn't real, this isn't real" she whispered.

"It is real, I promise. I put her in there myself and she looked beautiful. Come and say goodbye now, it's time." I whispered back, and she gripped me and moved to the coffin.

I held her there, looking back over my shoulder to see the hearse driver shake his head, a hint of exasperation in his eyes.

"Thank you for being here" her sister said and then let me go.

The mourners slipped away and as we prepared to put her back into the hearse for that final journey home, I noticed the man in his wrinkled suit, edging closer. His tie was in a hasty windsor knot, and the top button seemed uncomfortably tight.

We locked eyes, and I nodded. He wandered up to the coffin, and without touching it he leaned forward.

"Goodbye duck, you were one of the best. Goodbye now."

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The Last Hurrah team also encourages vigils, the family taking the deceased home to lie in state, or at our venue, late-night wakes for weeping and rousing remembrance, shroud burial, DIY funeral assistance, and more.

The Last Hurrah hold no specific ethos in regard to how the dead should be farewelled; instead our primary aim is to support those who are grieving to farewell their kith and kin in a way that is meaningful to them, and to create funerals and rites that truly and authentically reflect the person who has died.

We are happy to work with any religious or cultural traditions, and have made it a priority to connect with other funeral providers and clergy from many traditions in Melbourne, in order to support these kinds of rituals in a sensitive and authentic fashion, while still offering our compassionate and unique services.

Meet the team behind the Last Hurrah and find out why we changed our whole lives to offer a new way of doing funerals.

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The Last Hurrah team also encourages vigils, the family taking the deceased home to lie in state, or at our venue, late-night wakes for weeping and rousing remembrance, shroud burial, DIY funeral assistance, and more.

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最後のお別れもきちんとできない――。感染が拡大する新型コロナウイルスは、弔いの風景も一変させた。葬儀で感染が広がったとみられる例もあり、故人を悼む時間をどう確保するか、業者や遺族、参列者に戸惑いが広がっている。

Transformations in Japanese funeral culture including restrictions on Buddhist ritual

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最後のお別れもきちんとできない――。感染が拡大する新型コロナウイルスは、弔いの風景も一変させた。葬儀で感染が広がったとみられる例もあり、故人を悼む時間をどう確保するか、業者や遺族、参列者に戸惑いが広がっている。

3月下旬のある日、関東地方の火葬場に60代の女性の遺体が運び込まれた。立ち会ったのは息子と、遺体の搬送にあたった葬儀会社の2人の計3人。葬儀は営まれず、火葬だけが静かに進んだ。

関係者によると、女性は海外から帰国した後に新型コロナの感染が判明し、亡くなった。感染のリスクを避けるため、遺体は納体袋に包まれ、運転席とひつぎを置くスペースが完全に区切られた特殊な霊柩（れいきゅう）車に載せられた。業者は防護服を着用。息子は顔を見ることができぬまま、遺骨を受け取ったという。

「顔を見られずに別れなくてはならなくて、つらい」。新型コロナウイルスによる肺炎で亡くなったお笑いタレントの志村けんさんの兄、知之さんもそう吐露した。

「感染が怖い」　葬儀を断る業者

新型コロナに感染して亡くなった場合、いつも通りの葬儀はできないのか。

厚生労働省は感染者の遺体につ...

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医療・健康・福祉（アピタル）

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特殊な霊柩車に載せられた母、顔見ぬまま　一変した葬儀：朝日新聞デジタル

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最後のお別れもきちんとできない――。感染が拡大する新型コロナウイルスは、弔いの風景も一変させた。葬儀で感染が広がったとみられる例もあり、故人を悼む時間をどう確保するか、業者や遺族、参列者に戸惑いが広がっている。 　3月下旬のある日、関東地方の火葬場に60代の女性の遺体が運び込まれた。立ち会ったのは息子と、遺体の搬送にあたった葬儀会社の2人の計3人。葬儀は営まれず、火葬だけが静かに進んだ。 ...

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hospice workers create meaningful moments despite coronavirus threat - cnn

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These hospice workers find creative ways to bring light during a pandemic

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At a time when the specter of Covid-19 looms ominously over public health systems around the world, hospice workers are going above and beyond to create joyful and meaningful moments for patients and their loved ones. Some of these efforts hinge upon technology. Others are all about heart.

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My mum was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour at the beginning of the pandemic. We are having to care for her at home because the thought of her being alone in a hospice, with no visitors is heart breaking. Even with the technology to see her remotely.

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新型コロナの集団感染のリスクを避けられない葬式。参列できない人も、大切な人との別れの時間を共有できるよう、「葬儀のライブ動画」を配信するサービスも始まった。
Streaming of funerals by
buddhist priests in Japan

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新型コロナウイルスの感染拡大が止まらない中、多くの人が集まる葬儀の場にも影響が広がっている。3月には、国内でも通夜や告別式の参列者の間で集団感染が発生。家族だけで火葬のみ行うなど規模を大幅に縮小するケースが相次ぐ一方、参列できない人も故人との最後の時間を共有できるよう、葬儀の動画をネットで生配信するサービスを始めた企業もある。

「通夜をライブ配信してもいいでしょうか」。北九州市の永明寺の住職、松崎智海さん（44）は4月5日、葬儀会社との打ち合わせでこんな依頼を受けた。遺族が、新型コロナの影響で参列できなくなった東京都の親戚に、葬儀をリアルタイムで見せたいのだという。新型コロナの感染拡大によって寺に直接来られない人に向けて、3月にもYouTubeで彼岸の法要をライブ配信した松崎さん。遺族の申し出に二つ返事で承諾した。遺族はスマホで通夜を撮影したという。

「コロナのせいで親戚の葬式を諦めた。心の整理がつかない」

「妊娠後期で産婦人科から許可が出ず、葬儀にも四十九日にも出られなかった。今回に限らず、常にライブ配信かテレビ電話をOKにしてほしい」

「同じ思いを共有して故人に手を合わせることに、手段は問わないのでは」

松崎さんが葬儀の動画配信の件をツイッターでつぶやくと、配慮を支持する声が続々と寄せられた。松崎さんは「コロナを理由に参列を断念し、心残りになっている人もいる。葬儀の場に直接集まれるのが一番だが、今はやむを得ない状況。ネットを活用することで、参列できない人も『何もできなかったわけじゃなく、何らかの形で関われた』と思える」と前向きに受け止める。

冠婚葬祭事業を展開する「メモリード」（群馬県）は4月から、葬儀をライブ配信する無料サービスを開始した。元々、「遠方に住んでいたり高齢で長距離の移動が困難だったりする人も、故人とお別れできるようにしたい」と企画を進めていた中、新型コロナの混乱が発生した。

サービスでは、メモリードがカメラなどの機材を準備し、スタッフが葬儀の様子を撮影。喪主がLINE、TwitterなどSNSやメールで親族や友人に通知を送信する。受取人は、スマホやパソコンで通知のURLを開くとYouTube上で通夜や告別式の様子をリアルタイムで見ることができる。配信サービスと併せて、香典のオンライン決済も可能にした。

愛媛県松山市では３月下旬、通夜や葬儀に参列していた40〜80代の男女6人が集団感染した。その後、感染者の濃厚接触者にも感染が広がり、大人数が密集した場所で行われる葬儀の感染リスクの高さが露呈した。

終活関連ポータルサイトを運営する「鎌倉新書」によると、全国の提携葬儀社128社を対象に3月に実施したネット調査で、47.7%が「新型コロナウイルスにより参列者が減少した、または今後減少していく」と回答した。集団感染の発生への懸念や、感染者数が多い首都圏に呼び寄せることへの抵抗感があるとみられる。

東京都など4都県で葬儀サービスを提供する「東京葬儀」によると、3月に入り、通夜や告別式をせず火葬式のみを希望するケースが増加。新型コロナウイルスの流行以前に比べて3割ほど増え、現在は依頼数の半分を占めるという。チーフプランナーの古橋篤さん（35）は「ここ2、3年の葬儀自体の縮小傾向を、新型コロナがさらに加速させていることは間違いない」と言い切る。東京葬儀でも、家族の希望があれば葬儀のライブ配信を検討するという。

葬儀関連サービスのITベンチャー「よりそう」は、近親者のみで葬儀をした後、新型コロナが収束してから再度人を集めて葬儀を行う「後葬（あとそう）」のサービスを始めた。感染リスクの高い時期を避けた上で、年内にもう一度通夜や告別式をする仕組み。広報の高田綾佳さん(31)は「今は人を呼びたくても呼べない状況なので、遺族にとって満足のいく場を実現したい」としている。申し込みは4月末まで受け付ける。

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新型コロナで、葬儀もライブ配信 「離れていてもお別れしたい」

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新型コロナウイルスの感染拡大が止まらない中、多くの人が集まる葬儀の場にも影響が広がっている。3月には、国内でも通夜や告別式の参列者の間で集団感染が発生。家族だけで火葬のみ行うなど規模を大幅に縮小するケースが相次ぐ一方、参列できない人も故人との最後の時間を共有できるよう、葬儀の動画をネットで生配信するサービスを始めた企業もある。 ...

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Spanish funerals brought rapid spread of the coronavirus

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The region of Spain with the highest coronavirus infections has been traced back to two funerals. The bereaved had been unknowingly spreading the virus amongst each other. Funeral one The close knit community of Haro, in La Rioja, has been heavily affected by the outbreak that started at a local funeral.

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As the threat of the coronavirus grows, extra measurements are being taken to keep people safe. California is the first state to impose a lockdown and funeral workers are now added to the list of critical infrastructure workers, which allows them to continue their work while in lockdown.
In the wake of the Covid-19 health crisis the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) has worked with government officials to list mortuary workers as critical infrastructure workers, protecting communities and grieving families who will be in need of death care professionals.

Critical Mortuary Services

According to the the following mortuary workers are included in the list of critical infrastructure workers: "Workers performing mortuary services, including funeral homes, crematoriums, and cemetery workers" and "Workers who coordinate with other organizations to ensure the proper recovery, handling, identification, transportation, tracking, storage, and disposal of human remains and personal effects; certify cause of death; and facilitate access to mental/behavioral health services to the family members, responders, and survivors of an incident," are included in the "Healthcare/Public Health" category along with doctors, nurses, people performing testing and researchers. Essentially covering the full spectrum of those who work in death care.

California Lockdown

With California now under lockdown it's unclear if funerals are still permitted. The federal government guidelines had already urged no gatherings of over 10 people and the new California State lockdown doesn't state to what extent funerals can be held. For now many funeral directors are trying to help families with alternatives, such streaming services or service delays until lockdown is lifted.

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California is under lockdown and funeral workers are listed as critical infrastructure workers

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As the threat of the coronavirus grows, extra measurements are being taken to keep people safe. California is the first state to impose a lockdown and funeral workers are now added to the list of critical infrastructure workers, which allows them to continue their work while in lockdown.

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The Philippines government mandates that no COVID-19 deceased, or any deceased suspected of dying from it, can be denied by funeral homes.
The Filipino government was forced to take action regarding the disposition of coronavirus bodies after the first victim of coronavirus in the Philippines, a Chinese patriot who passed in February, was turned away from multiple crematoriums.

Filipino Government intervention

As a result the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases has passed a resolution seeking to penalize funeral parlors that refuse to handle the bodies of COVID-19 patients.

The resolution , read by Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles in a media briefing on Wednesday (March 25), tasks local government units and the Department of the Interior and Local Government to "monitor and penalize funeral homes that refuse to provide logistics and transport of COVID-19 remains."

Nograles said local officials should designate which funeral service facilities are capable of handling COVID-19 fatalities. Nograles clarified that staff and personnel offering funeral services are exempted from the quarantine, which means they can freely travel to and from their workplaces.

Cremation 12 hours after time of death

The government has mandated infected remains should be cremated within 12 hours from the time of death. Except for those with Muslim backgrounds, who should be put in an airtight sealed bag and still within 12 hours, in the presence of an Imam, be buried in the nearest Muslim cemetery.

Fears over safety of Filipino death care workers

Flores said that several funeral homes' staff are already lacking personal protective equipment (PPE), with some staff using raincoats as improvised PPEs. "We say they need to wear PPE, but we couldn't find anything. We're just improvising with whatever [protective gear] our staff is wearing." There is no clarity as of yet about these homes will receive additional supplies to protect themselves.

The discontinuation of wakes

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Philippines private crematoriums refusing to take COVID-19 victims

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The Philippines government mandates that no COVID-19 deceased, or any deceased suspected of dying from it, can be denied by funeral homes. The Filipino government was forced to take action regarding the disposition of coronavirus bodies after the first victim of coronavirus in the Philippines, a Chinese patriot who passed in February, was turned away...

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First US state officially bans funerals and memorial services

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Washington State Officials want it to be clear that funerals are considered "social gatherings" and are officially closed until the lockdown is lifted. Making it the first state in the US to officially ban services. Washington continues to have the highest coronavirus death rate with 95 deaths and 1,996 confirmed cases as of March 22.

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On March 31st the Sri Lanka's Ministry of Health issued COVID-19 guidelines saying the standard procedure of disposing bodies should be cremation. Reversing an earlier guideline that allowed traditional Islamic burials.

The World Health Organisation's guidelines for the safe management of a dead body during the coronavirus crisis allows for either burials or cremations. So it's unclear why the Sri Lankan government has decided to veer away from this decision.

A history of tension

The denial of burials for Muslims is causing international tension as it reignites the flames of the religious civil war the country has faced in the not so distant past, between the Buddhist majority and the Muslim minority.

Hilmy Ahamed, vice president of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka, told Al Jazeera."The Muslim community sees this as a racist agenda of extremist Buddhist forces that seem to hold the government to ransom."

Biraj Patnaik, Amnesty International's South Asia Director, said: "At this difficult time, the authorities should be bringing communities together - not deepening divisions between them .

Sri Lankan Muslims rights denied

The first death of a Muslim in Sri Lanka - in Negombo, a western coastal town - took place on Tuesday (31 March) before national guidelines were revised to exclude burials. Despite protests by the relatives of the deceased, community leaders and Muslim politicians, a burial was blocked by the authorities and cremation took place instead.

The second death in the Muslim community happened on Wednesday (1 April) at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the person was cremated a day later despite efforts by the victim's family and members of the Muslim community to carry out a burial.

A watching international community

The world is currently under panic thanks to the coronavirus and these kinds of mandates led to concern that religious tensions could be reignited if Muslim families not allowed to bury relatives in accordance with religious practice.

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Outcry in Sri Lanka as the government mandates cremation only for COVID-19 victims

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Amnesty International calls out the Sri Lanka government for forcing Muslim COVID-19 victims to be cremated against families' wishes. On March 31st the Sri Lanka's Ministry of Health issued COVID-19 guidelines saying the standard procedure of disposing bodies should be cremation. Reversing an earlier guideline that allowed traditional Islamic burials.

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Ecuadorian deceased left on the streets due to insufficient facilities and caskets

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On social media photos and videos have been circulating of bodies left on the streets of Guayaquil, the largest city of Ecuador. A local funeral home owner stated that they were unable to keep up with the demands. Ecuador now has over 3500 infected people and more than 170 people have died because of the COVID-19 disease.

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As the infection and death rates across Louisiana continue to grow the Mayor of New Orleans LaToya Cantrell wants to create a high level of safety around the dealing of the COVID-19 deceased and as such has set up a death care task force.
The New Orleans death care task force includes funeral home directors, coroners, cemetery directors, hospital officials, faith-based leaders and other stakeholders. The force is responsible for ensuring the proper care of those who passed from COVID-19, based on the newly released Louisiana guidelines .

Louisiana will follow the CDC Guidance regarding the safe handling of COVID-19 positive remains. As well as encouraging funeral arrangements to be held within 3 - 5 days of passing, with only immediate family in attendance.

"The COVID-19 outbreak has created a tragedy within a tragedy: Compromising the way our residents prepare their deceased loved ones to be laid to rest, and share in their grief the way we're accustomed to. And it won't get any easier," Mayor Cantrell said in a statement.

Task force member Dr. Gerry Cvitanovitch, the Jefferson Parish coroner, that on Sunday he had to rent a refrigerated truck to relieve hospitals of body storage because some funeral home directors and drivers didn't have proper personal protection equipment until very recently, and therefore couldn't handle the remains.

He also mentioned that some directors were still reluctant to handle coronavirus victims, although directors of some of the larger funeral homes in New Orleans reported having enough equipment, storage and capacity to keep providing services to families, at least for now.

Guidance for Safe Handling of Human Remains of COVID-19 Positive Patients in Louisiana Region 1 Hospitals

These recommendations give guidance on the safe handling of human remains that may contain COVID-19 and are for use by personnel who perform postmortem care in Louisiana Region 1 hospitals. In patients who die from COVID-19 virus, virus may be transmitted during postmortem care.

Only personnel trained in handling infected human remains and wearing appropriate PPE, should touch or move any COVID-19 infected remains. Handling of the remains should be kept to a minimum.
Personal protective equipment for postmortem care personnel
Personal protective equipment (PPE): Prior to contact with the body, postmortem care personnel must wear PPE consisting of impervious gown with full sleeve coverage, eye protection (e.g., face shield and goggles), N95 facemask, and double surgical gloves. Additional PPE may be required per facility guidelines. Donning and doffing PPE should be done in accordance with CDC Guidelines.

Putting on, wearing, removing and disposing of protective equipment: PPE should be in place BEFORE contact with the body, worn during the process of collection and placement in body bags, and should be removed immediately after and discarded as regulated medical waste. Use caution when removing PPE to avoid contaminating the wearer. Hand hygiene (washing your hands thoroughly with soap and water or an alcohol based hand rub) should be performed immediately following the removal of PPE. If hands are visibly soiled, use soap and water.
Postmortem preparation
Preparation of the body:

1. Identify (tag) the remains per hospital policy.

2. Insert cotton balls, wet with antiseptic solution, or other appropriate antiseptic materials into the mouth, nose, and ear openings.

3. Cover face with antiseptic cloth or other materials, wet with antiseptic solution.

4. Place the deceased in a white plastic body bag/pouch without contaminating the outside of the body bag/pouch.

5. Wipe the closed plastic white body bag/pouch, containing the deceased, with antiseptic cloth.

6. After the white body bag/pouch has dried, place identification of the deceased (Nam, Date of Death, etc.) and indicate that antiseptic packaging has been carried out.

7. Deceased are to be placed in a white body bag first and then placed into a black body bag second.

8. Wipe the plastic black body bag/pouch with antiseptic cloth.

9. After the black body bag/pouch has dried, clearly identify the deceased and indicate that antiseptic packaging has been carried out.

10. Place a notification tape across the zipper portion of the outer to indicate infectious remains are in the black body bag/pouch.

11. Transport the bagged deceased to the hospital morgue.

12. Perform surface decontamination of the transport gurney.

13. Clean and disinfect the patient's room according to CDC protocol.

14. Notify the Coroner's Office and funeral home that the deceased is COVID-19 positive. Coroner must be notified of all infectious and communicable deaths.

15. All medical equipment, including but not limited to lines, pics, and tubes be removed prior to sending the deceased to the morgue for release.

NOTE: Because organizations have decreased access to all of facilities, it is recommended to have releases of human remains take place at the point of digress/exit (hospitals, coroners, facilities etc.) instead of having outside personnel enter the facility to make the removal.
Funeral Home Guidance

Funeral Home Staff
PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT FOR POSTMORTEM CARE PERSONNEL
Personal protective equipment (PPE): Prior to contact with the body, postmortem care personnel must wear PPE consisting of impervious gown with full sleeve coverage, eye protection (e.g., face shield and goggles), N95 facemask, and double surgical gloves. Additional PPE may be required per facility guidelines. Donning and doffing PPE should be done in accordance with CDC Guidelines.
REMOVAL FROM LOCATION OF DEATH OR LOCATION OF DECEASED
If Hospital, Coroner or Facility Removal - Funeral Home Removal Personnel will inspect for Completion of Facility Preparation as listed above and confirm identity of deceased.

If field death released from place of death - Funeral Home Personnel will perform steps 1-11 and transport to funeral home to prepare for burial.

FUNERAL GUIDANCE

There is currently no known risk associated with being in the same room at a funeral or visitation service with the body of someone who died of COVID-19. A funeral or visitation service can be held for a person who has died of COVID-19 as long as strict adherence to local and state orders are held.

While there is no risk, consideration should be given to the guidance that we should limit community spread by discouraging gatherings.

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New Orleans establishes an official death care task force

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As the infection and death rates across Louisiana continue to grow the Mayor of New Orleans LaToya Cantrell wants to create a high level of safety around the dealing of the COVID-19 deceased and as such has set up a death care task force. The New Orleans death care task force includes funeral home directors,...

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The Delhi neighborhood of Punjabi Bagh public cremation grounds has decided to no longer allow a pyre service to anyone who is confirmed to have passed from COVID-19.
In India it's common that families take their departed home after a passing to perform sacred rights, as is inline with many religious beliefs and traditions. Today's lockdown, curfews, and fear of coronavirus though have families bringing the departed immediately to the cremation areas.

The head priest of one of the noted cremation grounds in the capital, Pankaj Sharma, said, "In case a person who has died of COVID-19 is cremated here, the family will be informed to send the body to the Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) machine." in his opinion, "the virus can spread with the fumes" and also, "it's just a decision that has been made". While there is no evidence to support that coronavirus can be spread through the fumes of a pyre, this is the decision of the Punjabi Bagh officials.

Cremation ground precautions

To protect the staff and the community, even those who do not die of coronavirus for now will no longer have the option of being reclothed or showered in holy water as is standard in some last rights. Additionally there will be a limit of 10 - 15 guests allowed per family.

Mr. Sharma said "as people enter and exit, not only are they asked to wash hands but also are provided with sanitizers," adding that chairs, gates and the entire premises is being sanitized first thing every morning.

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Traditional Pyres no longer possible for Indian COVID-19 victims

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The Delhi neighborhood of Punjabi Bagh public cremation grounds has decided to no longer allow a pyre service to anyone who is confirmed to have passed from COVID-19. In India it's common that families take their departed home after a passing to perform sacred rights, as is inline with many religious beliefs and traditions.

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Funeral directors in the Netherlands started "drive-in condoleance" services, to enable next of kin to pay their last respects to the deceased. See also: https://www.ad.nl/utrecht/wel-stoppen-maar-niet-uitstappen-bij-drive-in-condoleance-in-vianen~ae9394d9/

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Een laatste groet vanuit de auto, 'zo kun je in ieder geval afscheid nemen'

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Met een drive-in condoleance kunnen mensen die niet tot de directe familie van de overledene behoren, toch afscheid nemen.

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Posted April 11, 2020 05:00:57

On a Sunday morning in late March, I got the call I'd been dreading.

It was my mum, clearly upset, calling to tell me my grandfather had finally succumbed to the cancer he'd been battling for some time.

I would have driven to my grandmother's house immediately, were it not for the demands of social distancing. We would embrace, cry together, tell stories and inevitably have food thrust upon us that we were in no mood to eat.

Instead, I stayed home. So did my brothers and cousins. I didn't even get to see my mother. We mourned with our smaller family units, our husbands and wives, our children. We are lucky none of us live alone and were forced to be completely isolated in our grief.

Of course, there were phone calls and old photos shared to our family's private Facebook page. But it lacked the warmth of being in a room with the people I've grown up with, hearing them tell stories from their childhoods, managing a laugh despite the tug in my chest.

We all absolutely understood the importance of doing what we can to slow the spread of coronavirus. The last thing we wanted was one of our elder family members to become infected.

Two days later, we watched a livestream of Nannu's funeral from home.

It was not at all like the funeral we would have had for him under normal circumstances. It was in a funeral home at the cemetery rather than in the church he attended every week.

The 10 people in attendance - my grandmother, aunties and uncles - had to sit in seats spaced so that each person had four square metres around them.

I could only see the backs of their heads as the livestream camera was set up at the back of the room, but it seemed a bit stilted with everyone trying to keep their distance.

We've resolved to have the big memorial service my grandfather deserved when all this is over.

What we didn't know was what impact social gathering restrictions might have on our ability to process Nannu's death.

Rituals help us process death

Clinical psychologist and University of Wollongong lecturer, Dr Emanuela Brusadelli, said the upheaval of social isolation created a surreal situation that was an additional source of distress when we lose someone we love.

"In this situation we can risk developing complicated grief," she said. "Because, at the moment, it is impossible for us to [perform] rituals. Rituals to face death are essential. With rituals, we start to elaborate the process of grief so, in a certain way, we feel active in the face of the death especially during this period that we feel powerless and everything is out of our control.

"Because the normal rituals are not possible at the moment, it is very important for us - and our mental health - to create new ones to help ourselves understand what is happening. [It] helps us face the strong feelings we have and helps us to understand and accept this new situation."

Anthropology Professor Tamara Kohn, from University of Melbourne, said death is one of life's transitions that is universally marked with a ritual of some sort. However funerals are just one tradition.

"In some societies you don't have what we'd call a funeral but have activity you do together or you sit together to remember the dead or you might even do something like bury the dead then many years later, pull up the bones and have a ritual with the family and close relatives and others," she said. "These things are really variable but we imagine them to be static."

She said waiting to commemorate the death of someone we love is not a new concept.

"One can look at very vastly different cultural behaviours around death where people do wait a long period of time - and sometimes it's a number of days or number of years even - and one can try and then understand how that way of celebrating death speaks to ideas in that society about what it is to be a person, what it is to be a loved one.

"[It's interesting] to think about how flexible we've had to be in the past."

Technology can bring us together

Professor Kohn is part of an Australian Research Council funded team called DeathTech. Part of the team's research investigates technology used to give people what is known as a "good death" one where people can come together to grieve, even if they are physically distant.

This technology could be as simple as a livestream or a Facebook memorial page. But she has seen more complex concepts being developed including a robot which has the image of someone who can't attend on the screen and that person controls the robot from another location.

"[With a robot] you could interact with people socially as you might if you were physically present," Prof Kohn said. "Which is a really interesting idea and interesting to think about.

"There are other technologies that are being developed, for example the use of drones to not only be a vehicle to look at cemetery spaces from afar but perhaps drones could be used as well in bringing together people from different parts of the world but even different parts of the city that are in isolation.

"Another thing that is possible is in online gaming, where you create these spaces, they're really virtual places where people go to gather, you could host an alter where people leave things and share stories there.

"We now need to produce a different kind of intimacy."

'We are social animals'

In the aftermath of my father's death nearly 20 years ago, the shock of his passing was cushioned by the crowds of people around us offering support. It's one thing to be told he was loved by many, it was so much more powerful to see all those people, en masse, united by the pain of losing one man.

Prof Kohn said studies of funerals in Western Anglo societies tended to show that when people think about a funeral, they usually remember the number of people present and the performance of eulogies.

"For now, the number of people actually present is being challenged but there are ways of to be there and to connect with people, whether it's through that ritual performance or whether it's a bit later, it's still attending. It's a different kind of attendance. Maybe people will reflect a little bit differently about what it is to be with someone through this experience."

Dr Brusadelli said the best thing people who were grieving during social isolation could do was build a solid interpersonal network around themselves.

"It's important to share it with other people because we are social animals," she said.

And while we might have to delay a funeral or other ritual, it is important to have some sort of ritual to mark the death of a loved one as soon as possible.

"The future is really uncertain so you need to start thinking about how to take care of yourself in the here and now," she says.

"Keep in mind that we are isolated but not alone. Ask for help, [particularly] if your rumination continues. People need to learn fast the importance of taking care of themselves."

While I would never have wished for the situation we've found ourselves in, there have been silver linings to the unexpected way my family has grieved my grandfather.

The livestream was still available the day after the funeral, so when I was more composed I could watch it with my 8-year-old and explain what was happening and help him work through his feelings without my emotions getting in the way.

All the photos posted to our Facebook page have given me a little place to remember my grandfather during the quiet parts of my day.

These new rituals have helped me feel more connected to my family. It's a virtual place to grieve together until we can finally see each other in real life.

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When my grandfather died, his funeral was nothing like we expected

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Posted April 11, 2020 05:00:57 On a Sunday morning in late March, I got the call I'd been dreading. It was my mum, clearly upset, calling to tell me my grandfather had finally succumbed to the cancer he'd been battling for some time.

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Emergency planners have drawn up proposals to deal with "excess deaths" of between 210,000 and 315,000 over a 15-week period as part of longstanding measures to ensure the UK can cope with a deadly pandemic.

The "reasonable worst-case scenario" was first established a decade ago and still forms part of the underlying planning, supporting the coronavirus action plan announced by Boris Johnson at an emergency Cobra meeting on Monday.

Politicians and officials have been reluctant to speculate on how many could be at risk if coronavirus spread into large numbers of the British population, but health officials pointed to documents that spelled out the worst-case assumptions.

Excess deaths at this level would amount to about 0.4% to 0.5% of the British population and are based in part on a 2.5% mortality rate, although this week Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, said he anticipated a mortality rate of no higher than 1%.

The figures are set out in a special document for emergency planners from 2013, which states that "the government judges that one of the highest current risks to the UK is the possible emergence of an influenza pandemic" - long considered a more deadly national risk than terrorism or a disaster.

Crisis planners around the country are expected to have liaised with everybody in what is called the "death management process" - coroners, funeral directors, mortuary managers, and burial and cremation authorities - to ensure they have plans to cope in a pandemic outbreak.

A wide range of services would have to contend with a coronavirus emergency, although emergency planning is a local council activity and there are questions about how well it has been resourced over years of austerity, with £15bn of cuts to council services since 2010.

Mike Granatt, a former head of the civil contingencies secretariat, said the confused and sluggish initial response to the Grenfell disaster in 2017 demonstrated that "emergency planning has certainly taken a hit" in the past decade.

Emergency planners insist, despite the challenges, that they are prepared. Jacqui Semple, chair of the Emergency Planning Society, said: "All public sector services have been reduced because of austerity and that includes emergency planning."

Semple added: "What it doesn't mean is that the job in hand has not been done." She argued that everybody in the emergency services sector from the NHS to police would say the same. "We could always do with more money," she added.

The document also makes clear schools might have to close on a precautionary basis - although that is not current official advice - and says all organisations would have to deal with high level of sickness if a flu-like illness such as the coronavirus spread widely. Sickness rates could hit 20%, rising to 35% in small organisations, at a peak point.

Emergency planners report up into the Cobra system, used by ministers and officials to consolidate information and take decisions in times of crisis. On Monday, Johnson chaired a meeting of the committee for the first time since reports of the illness emerged from China in January.

That authorised a 28-page action plan, focused on containing the spread of the disease, only for Whitty to admit by Thursday the government was moving towards a "delay phase", which happens when officials believe an epidemic was becoming inevitable.

Experts questioned whether the political machine was responding quickly enough to the coronavirus crisis. Bob Kerslake, a former head of the civil service, said the dilemma for Downing Street was that by the time the need to close schools or halt public gatherings to disrupt the spread of the disease became obvious, it could easily be too late because the virus would have spread too far.

The crossbencher warned that "if ministers believe that emergency measures will be necessary, they should act now". Lord Kerslake added: "Their problem is that by the time we know for sure how serious the coronavirus outbreak is, it'll be too late, because such measures will be unable to halt its transmission."

Quick guide
What are coronavirus symptoms and should I go to a doctor?

What is Covid-19?

It is caused by a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared it a pandemic.

What are the symptoms this coronavirus causes?

According to the WHO, the most common symptoms of Covid-19 are fever, tiredness and a dry cough. Some patients may also have a runny nose, sore throat, nasal congestion and aches and pains or diarrhoea. Some people report losing their sense of taste and/or smell. About 80% of people who get Covid-19 experience a mild case - about as serious as a regular cold - and recover without needing any special treatment.

About one in six people, the WHO says, become seriously ill. The elderly and people with underlying medical problems like high blood pressure, heart problems or diabetes, or chronic respiratory conditions, are at a greater risk of serious illness from Covid-19.

In the UK, the National health Service (NHS) has identified the specific symptoms to look for as experiencing either:

a high temperature - you feel hot to touch on your chest or back

a new continuous cough - this means you've started coughing repeatedly

As this is viral pneumonia, antibiotics are of no use. The antiviral drugs we have against flu will not work, and there is currently no vaccine. Recovery depends on the strength of the immune system.

Should I go to the doctor if I have a cough?

Medical advice varies around the world - with many countries imposing travel bans and lockdowns to try and prevent the spread of the virus. In many place people are being told to stay at home rather than visit a doctor of hospital in person. Check with your local authorities.

In the UK, NHS advice is that anyone with symptoms should stay at home for at least 7 days. If you live with other people, they should stay at home for at least 14 days, to avoid spreading the infection outside the home.

How many people have been affected?

China's national health commission confirmed human-to-human transmission in January. As of 6 April, more than 1.25m people have been infected in more than 180 countries, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

There have been over 69,500 deaths globally. Just over 3,200 of those deaths have occurred in mainland China. Italy has been worst affected, with over 15,800 fatalities, and there have been over 12,600 deaths in Spain. The US now has more confirmed cases than any other country - more than 335,000. Many of those who have died had underlying health conditions, which the coronavirus complicated.

More than 264,000 people are recorded as having recovered from the coronavirus.

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Thank you for your feedback.

A small number of schools have been closed when cases have been detected, while a nervous public have been panic-buying hand sanitiser, soap and dry food staples such as pasta and rice in supermarkets.
Coronavirus: charities rally to help older people in self-isolation
Critics also say the government is struggling with communications, having just reversed a post-election boycott of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. On Wednesday, it decided that it would not release a regional breakdown of coronavirus cases but had to perform a U-turn after objections that the public was being denied transparency.

Granatt, also a former head of the government information service, said the imperative was "to generate and reinforce trust every day", and argued that the previous boycott "was exactly the worst thing to do" particularly because older people, who are among those most at risk, turn instinctively "to trusted broadcasters and newspapers, and particularly the BBC".

Cobra stands for Cabinet Office briefing room A, but in reality it describes a system for handling any national crisis. In fact, key meetings tend to take place in room F, the largest, which sits about 20 people, surrounded by screens for presentations or remote attendees. Sometimes gallows humour can take hold, even in the worst situations, as happened at a meeting on Friday last week, where other participants noted wryly that Whitty, the most senior doctor in England, appeared to have a cold.
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UK has plans to deal with pandemic causing up to 315,000 deaths

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Emergency planners have drawn up proposals to deal with "excess deaths" of between 210,000 and 315,000 over a 15-week period as part of longstanding measures to ensure the UK can cope with a deadly pandemic.

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Funeral directors are being told to create makeshift face masks out of "towels, bin liners and incontinence pads", as they remove the bodies of coronavirus victims, because of a severe shortage of protective equipment in the UK.

Faced with the unprecedented task of retrieving and arranging the burial and cremation of growing numbers who have died of Covid-19, funeral staff say they are increasingly concerned at the risk because of the lack of masks and protective gowns.

With the death toll from the virus mounting, they are calling for a minister to take charge of burials and cremations, and warning of a backlog of bodies.

The Lancashire coroner has advised funeral directors to treat all sudden deaths in the community from now on as a suspected coronavirus fatality because people with symptoms have been told to self-isolate and may be undiagnosed victims.

Quick guide
What to do if you have coronavirus symptoms in the UK

Symptoms are defined by the NHS as either:

a high temperature - you feel hot to touch on your chest or back

a new continuous cough - this means you've started coughing repeatedly

NHS advice is that anyone with symptoms should stay at home for at least 7 days.

If you live with other people, they should stay at home for at least 14 days, to avoid spreading the infection outside the home.

After 14 days, anyone you live with who does not have symptoms can return to their normal routine. But, if anyone in your home gets symptoms, they should stay at home for 7 days from the day their symptoms start. Even if it means they're at home for longer than 14 days.

If you live with someone who is 70 or over, has a long-term condition, is pregnant or has a weakened immune system, try to find somewhere else for them to stay for 14 days.

If you have to stay at home together, try to keep away from each other as much as possible.

After 7 days, if you no longer have a high temperature you can return to your normal routine.
If you still have a high temperature, stay at home until your temperature returns to normal.
If you still have a cough after 7 days, but your temperature is normal, you do not need to continue staying at home. A cough can last for several weeks after the infection has gone.

Staying at home means you should:

not go to work, school or public areas

not use public transport or taxis

not have visitors, such as friends and family, in your home

not go out to buy food or collect medicine - order them by phone or online, or ask someone else to drop them off at your home

You can use your garden, if you have one. You can also leave the house to exercise - but stay at least 2 metres away from other people.

If you have symptoms of coronavirus, use the NHS 111 coronavirus service to find out what to do.
Source: NHS England on 23 March 2020

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In a document sent to funeral directors, the coroner said: "Police and removals undertakers attending a sudden death where Covid-19 is suspected should before moving the body ensure that the deceased's mouth and nose are covered.

"This could be as simple as using a towel, bin liner or something like an incontinence pad cut to fit over the mouth and nose."

Louise Winter, a funeral director who runs Poetic Endings in London, said: "If someone has died with an infectious disease, we are supposed to put a mask over their mouth and nose, as well as use one ourselves, because of the infection risk from their mouth and nose.

"But we are short of masks and protective equipment, and they are trying to find a solution. If the advice is to go into a nursing home or a house and use a bit of towel or an incontinence pad, that is not OK. People in the profession are getting very worried."

Funeral directors said there are also a shortage of body bags, which are required when dealing with infectious disease deaths.

Dr James Adeley, the senior coroner for Lancashire, Blackburn and Darwen, who sent the advice on makeshift masks, said he had great sympathy for the concerns of undertakers.

He said he had sourced some plastic aprons and paper masks to try to provide protection but the recommendation from Public Health England (PHE) of a full suit, gloves, visor and mask was not available.

"What we were doing was simply trying to take those measures that we could to protect the health of those that are going to be dealing with deceased people who are very possibly highly infective," said Adeley.

David Holmes, who has been in the profession for more than 40 years, said: "First they told us we needed to wear full PPE [personal protective equipment], that's a full white forensic suit, mask and goggles.

"Then last week they told us none of that was necessary - what happened was they discovered that no one had adequate supplies of equipment. It clearly puts funeral directors at greater risk and our staff are not happy."

Crematoria and burial services normally deal with about 600,000 deaths a year.

Holmes said there was a lack of coordinated planning for the scale of deaths to come, which would put the whole system under intense pressure. He warned that without action there would be a backlog of bodies. "A minister needs to be put in charge of this. There is no planning going on and there is going to be a scandalous logjam."

The National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors has warned its members to err on the side of caution when dealing with a suspected Covid-19 death.

In advice to members, it said PHE had last week downgraded the protective equipment needed. "We are not comfortable with this," the society said, warning funeral directors to use "a mask, double gloves and an apron as PPE" at all times.

"PPE supplies are drastically short. We have requested the Cabinet Office fast-track supplies to funeral homes."

It added: "If you are limited on masks, use wadding, dressing or bandage to cover the face during the removal. This should reduce the risk to staff from any droplets of contaminated air."
Topics

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Funeral directors told to make masks out of 'towels and bin liners'

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Funeral directors are being told to create makeshift face masks out of "towels, bin liners and incontinence pads", as they remove the bodies of coronavirus victims, because of a severe shortage of protective equipment in the UK.

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Postcards from the pandemic is a new series that looks at how everyday Australians are coping with immense changes coronavirus has brought to their lives.

Bert Cattermole, riddled with cancer, switched on the TV to find out the latest news about the coronavirus. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, was announcing a further tightening of restrictions, including the "very difficult" decision to limit attendance at funerals to 10 people.

Bert turned to family members caring for him and said without fuss: "Oh well, that's you seven [children] and three more."

Early the next morning, Bert, 82, died in his recliner chair. For the Cattermole family, like others throughout the country and the world, Covid-19 has brought a further layer of grief to losing a close family member. It's the "no touching" that seems cruel. No embraces, no arm around a shoulder, no comfort for the weeping.

Postcards from the pandemic: The future's still bright but home school due to coronavirus is tough in your final year

Jane Cattermole, 58, the fourth of Bert's eight children (one sibling is not in contact with the family), helped look after her father at her sister Ann's house in the final days.

For such a large family - Bert had 24 grandchildren and 34 great-grandchildren - it was especially difficult. Visits were limited to the adult children.

"Some of the grandkids did visit but mainly we were strict about that," says Jane. "We FaceTimed so the grandkids could have a chat with him when he perked up a little bit. Most of them rang up and said goodbye to him over video."

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Bert Cattermole with his children

The limit of 10 at a funeral is extraordinary but Australia has so far imposed less severe restrictions than some countries. In Italy and New Zealand funerals are banned.

Bert had no religious convictions, but for those who do, the rituals around burial are ancient. Muslims, for instance, wash the body, wrap it in a shroud, and hold communal prayer.

Under Covid-19 health department guidelines, close handling of the body is not recommended but it can be done under strict conditions. They advise that families should not kiss the deceased.

The days after someone dies are always strange. Apart from the emotion and exhaustion of it, there's so much to be done. The siblings comforted each other from afar, and the meeting with the celebrant was on FaceTime.

The funeral was held in Baldivis, a suburb of Perth, at 10am last Friday. Ten cream chairs were set up in the chapel, all spaced apart. Jane was the first in, followed at a distance by nine others (the Western Australian government allowed 10 family members, plus two officials). There were seven of Bert's children - Margaret, Paul, Ann, Jane, Andrew, Angela and James - and three of their partners.

The celebrant, Kevin Clune, told the tiny gathering that "without the needs of our current stage of containing Covid-19, this chapel would be overflowing".

During this crisis, modern technology is helping maintain connection, even at funerals. It was livestreamed so family and friends could watch.

Every life is unique, every family complicated. Jane's eulogy outlined her father's life, from his days as a Yorkshire coalminer, marrying Mary at a young age, and bringing their rowdy mob of kids to Australia in 1975 as "10-pound poms". Mary died a few years ago and Bert nursed her to the end.

A kidney donation from a 13-year-old boy saved Bert's life and he savoured the two decades it gave him. He was a "good, decent, fair and generous man", Jane says. When he was encouraged to go off all drugs towards the end, to surrender to death, he refused to stop taking the anti-rejection medication that protected his kidney. "He wanted to honour that little boy and his family to the end."

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Her father had at first struggled to accept Jane's and another sister's sexuality, treating their same-sex partners with coldness. That changed, and in his final days of life he apologised for his early intolerance. "He wanted us to know that he loved us and always had."

Postcards from the pandemic: losing a business and a life purpose

The rituals of a funeral were all there. Bert's closest friends, Olive and Noel Grafton, could not attend owing to the restrictions, but Angela read out a letter from them to honour more than 40 years of friendship. A poem was read on behalf of the grandchildren. Bert's favourite song, Tom T Hall's Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine, filled the chapel.

Towards the end of the service, Jane reached over and threw her arms around Ann. It was against the rules but Jane does not regret it. "Ann just cried the whole way through," she says. "She was the one whose house he was in. It was so sad, and she just lost it a little bit."

One day, when all this is over, the Cattermole family plans a big celebration of Bert's life; when all the family and friends can be there, and everyone can tell stories and hug each other. They understand that it has to wait.

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Bert Cattermole and family in the Doncaster Gazette

"We never would have expected his last days and funeral would occur this way," Jane says. "Other generations have had to deal with different hardships and we've just got to deal with this."

The family's biggest fear was that the funeral would somehow seem makeshift, not a "proper" funeral. But it felt real.

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Bert Cattermole last year visiting the Yorkshire Dales, where he grew up and worked before moving to Australia in 1975

"I actually thought it was quite beautiful. It was quite intimate ... It was kind of strangely perfect to me. It was just us and it was just fine."
We'd like to hear your story about how you are managing during this crisis. Email: postcards@theguardian.com Topics

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'It was quite intimate': a tiny funeral for a big family man

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Postcards from the pandemic is a new series that looks at how everyday Australians are coping with immense changes coronavirus has brought to their lives. Bert Cattermole, riddled with cancer, switched on the TV to find out the latest news about the coronavirus.

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A number of councils are banning funeral ceremonies because of the coronavirus crisis.

Bradford, Leeds and Kirklees councils have said families will no longer be able to attend services at crematoria. Instead the councils will offer "direct cremations", in which there is no ceremony and mourners are not present; and burial services at gravesides, with a maximum of 10 mourners observing physical distancing guidelines.

The new rules will take effect from Monday in Kirklees and Bradford. Leeds has been offering direct cremations only for the past two weeks.

There have been increasing reports of people being buried or cremated with no immediate family present. On Friday, Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, 13, who died of the coronavirus at Kings College hospital, in south London, was buried without his mother or six siblings present as they were isolating after a brother and sister became symptomatic.

Government guidelines, drawn up in conjunction with ethicists and faith leaders, permit close family members to attend funerals while observing physical distancing.

The Church of England has banned church funeral services, saying immediate family only may attend at gravesides, and that burials can be livestreamed to other relatives and friends.

In a statement, Bradford council said the decision to end funeral services had been "very difficult".

Cllr Sarah Ferriby said: "These are unprecedented times. I never thought that we would have to make the sad decisions which we are having to make in terms of the services we provide. Our first consideration is that we have to protect people from this virus to ensure that the health and wellbeing of those that we work with, the public, council staff, partners and stakeholders is protected."

The council said it would be reducing its cremation charges to reflect the fact that no chapel services will be permitted.

A spokesperson for Kirklees council said: "Whilst the council will no longer offer a full funeral service or allow families to come into the crematoria, it hopes that providing the opportunity for a vicar or celebrant to say a prayer or a few words in the chapel will bring some comfort to families and loved ones."

All three councils suggested that families could hold a celebration of life or similar service later in the year when their facilities were available again.

Guidance published last week by Public Health England advised funeral directors and faith leaders to restrict the number of mourners who attend funerals, and to ensure people stayed at least two metres apart.

It said: "Only members of the deceased person's household or close family members should attend funerals. Any individual displaying symptoms of Covid-19 should not attend. Those who do attend will need to adhere to social distancing at all times, including when travelling to and from the funeral."

Because of the "small but real risk of of transmission from the body of a deceased person", rituals or practices that bring mourners into close contact with the deceased should only be carried out with the correct personal protective equipment.

Mohamed Omer, a board member of the Gardens of Peace Muslim cemeteries, said: "It is welcoming to note that we can perform our ritual wash as long as we observe the necessary precautions of wearing the right PPE and follow the process included in this guideline."
Topics

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UK councils begin to ban funeral ceremonies due to coronavirus

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A number of councils are banning funeral ceremonies because of the coronavirus crisis. Bradford, Leeds and Kirklees councils have said families will no longer be able to attend services at crematoria. Instead the councils will offer "direct cremations", in which there is no ceremony and mourners are not present; and burial services at gravesides, with a maximum of 10 mourners observing physical distancing guidelines.

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Lorena Borjas dedicated her life to helping others as an activist for the transgender community in New York City, bailing people out of jail, fighting against transphobia and championing the rights of human trafficking victims.

But when she died this week from COVID-19, the people who loved her the most could not come together to mourn her.

"She held people together," said Chase Strangio, a longtime friend and collaborator. "When you lose someone like that, you long for a sense of connecting."

Saying goodbye to a loved one is a ritual that transcends social and cultural differences. Even in secular societies, survivors participate in some combination of prayer and remembrance to honor the departed. These traditions are being upended as governments across the globe impose strict social distancing orders, forcing people to find new ways to grieve.

"We created a Zoom," Strangio said. "It was the only thing we knew to do."
Download the NBC News app for full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak
Borjas died Monday morning in New York, which has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the country. By 7 p.m., more than 200 people logged on for the virtual remembrance.

The experience felt both overwhelming and incomplete, said Strangio, who helped organize the event. He watched helplessly as people cried alone in their apartments. There were no hugs or shared meals to affirm life. Instead, people typed comments in the chat section or posted photos of Borjas online.

"We have a community of people who already feel like they're at risk of death all the time," Strangio said. "The memorial was awful and beautiful."

Dr. Steven Thrasher, a faculty member at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, was one of the many people who logged on for Borjas' memorial. He has been stuck in New York since the coronavirus outbreak brought the city to a standstill and is grateful to be staying with friends instead of alone in his Chicago apartment.

Still, Thrasher felt a sense of anger while watching the memorial service online. Borjas always showed up when people needed her, he said. She frequently accompanied sex workers to court appearances. It was her way of humanizing some of society's most vulnerable members and comforting them during their darkest hours. But when Borjas died, no one could be there for her.

"It felt very strange and alienating to be bearing witness as a small square on a screen," Thrasher said.

Nearly all faith traditions offer end-of-life ceremonies. The ritual is so important, people are willing to risk their health just to attend one. Earlier this week, 70 people gathered in a New Jersey residence for a funeral despite Gov. Phil Murphy's stay-at-home order. At least 15 attendees were charged with violating a rule or regulation adopted by the governor during a state of emergency.

In Georgia, 200 people recently came together to remember the life of a retired janitor. Days after the service, about two dozen relatives who attended the funeral fell ill, The New York Times reported. Epidemiologists are calling it a "super-spreading event."

Planning a funeral or deciding whether to attend one during the pandemic can be a devastating choice for survivors. A lack of closure could delay emotional healing while prolonged self-isolation might trigger depression, mental health experts warn. Many families simply feel lost, their grief exacerbated by anxiety about a worsening crisis.

Kenan Kapetanovic, director of operations and funeral director at the Islamic Center of Southern California, has been helping families navigate end-of-life ceremonies at a time when gatherings of any kind are prohibited throughout the state. Kapetanovic said families are no longer invited to view remains, and they cannot meet with staff in-person to arrange services.

In the Islamic tradition, the deceased are usually buried within 24 to 48 hours of death. The remains are washed and purified and then shrouded in cloth before internment. But public health concerns make it impossible for even trained staff to handle remains in such a way, Kapetanovic said. As a precautionary measure, all remains that pass through the Islamic Center are treated as though they tested positive for coronavirus.

And families must wait 48 hours before picking up remains to protect staff from potential infection. Then instead of shrouding the deceased in a traditional cloth, remains are first placed inside a body bag.

Once the body is prepared for burial and taken to an internment site, loved ones must either watch from their cars or step out one-by-one to pay their final respects. Touching is discouraged, and no prayers are recited.

"This is not easy to hear," Kapetanovic said. "It's a shock for families."

Like other spiritual institutions, the Islamic Center is now offering streaming services for families who don't want to forgo prayer and religious rites.

At the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, faith leaders are also encouraging families to seek alternatives to traditional rites in the coming weeks. President and CEO Jay Sanderson said community members are streaming bris, or male circumcision, ceremonies, holding Zoom weddings and even celebrating bar and bat mitzvahs online.

Recently, Sanderson sat shiva, the Jewish tradition of sitting with a mourning family for seven days and nights, for two different community members. It felt like an extension of what has become an everyday reality for millions of people.

"I spend my entire days from morning to night on Zoom calls," he said. "I see the world through a 'Brady Bunch' screen."

If the experience felt impersonal, it also created an opportunity for mourners from all over the world to participate, he said. At least one of the remembrances included Israeli loved ones who otherwise might not have been able to sit shiva in person.

At a time when everyone is forced to adapt to social distancing and stay-at-home orders, virtual memorials at least offer a space to grieve collectively if only for a short time, Sanderson said. Looking back at the Zoom memorials, he was grateful to hear stories about how one elderly couple met and fell in love 50 years ago.

"There is a deep sadness with not being able to comfort one another," he said. "I tell families this will pass. They will get through this."

Both Sanderson and Kapetanovic expect to see community members in person after the pandemic loosens its grip on the country. Strangio is already planning how to honor Borjas in person. He saved all the comments and photos people shared of her and intends to create a booklet as a tribute.

"Her legacy is to make sure that no one is left behind - that people are cared for," Strangio said. "We rely on each other. That's what she taught us."

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'Awful and beautiful': Saying goodbye to coronavirus victims without a funeral

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Lorena Borjas dedicated her life to helping others as an activist for the transgender community in New York City, bailing people out of jail, fighting against transphobia and championing the rights of human trafficking victims. But when she died this week from COVID-19, the people who loved her the most could not come together to mourn her.

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As the coronavirus pandemic limits people's ability to mourn, they are finding new ways to say goodbye.

Family members of Anthony Schilizzi, 75, mourned him on Staten Island last month after he died from Covid-19. Credit... Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times

My father died of the coronavirus last week, and I'm not sure how to mourn. No visitors were allowed in the hospital, and my family did not get final goodbyes and I-love-yous, even over the phone. We think he died alone. My sister planned a service, but only a few people were there, and everyone had to remain six feet apart. I took the bus home, skipping the burial because I have no car and didn't want to violate the six-feet rule. Afterward, we could not grieve together as a family or share a meal, stories, laughter and tears. In ordinary circumstances, I would have my retail job to go back to, which would help me regain a sense of normalcy. That option doesn't exist now. How do I find closure? Maybe I can do a video conference, but it seems so impersonal and incomplete.

THERESA SCHILIZZI, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Dear Theresa,

I couldn't be sorrier about the loss of your father, or your quandary, which looms over us all. We may be about to confront death on a scale few of us have ever known, while being stripped of time-honored consolations: wakes, funerals, shivas. When the hour calls for togetherness, we will be apart.

When I called you to learn more, you told me that two years ago, you took a course called "The Art of Dying," about finding new ways to bring honor to the end of life. "It changed me, to view death in a sacred way," you said. Instead, your father got an ending that defied everything you had learned about saying goodbye.

To find answers, I turned to therapists and members of the clergy. Most of their advice was compassionate but resigned: Stay safe. Call friends. Even if a more extensive memorial is planned for later, don't forgo the opportunity to mourn now. Give Zoom and Google Hangouts a try.

"It's the best that we can do under these circumstances," said Rabbi Jesse Olitzky of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, N.J., who has been leading funerals and shivas over Zoom.

That did not seem like enough. Grasping for more, I contacted historians of death, seeking clues about how previous generations mourned amid pandemics. They offered some of the more hopeful answers, and a prediction: This crisis would transform the way we grieve. These kinds of catastrophes are what push us forward in our mourning rituals, and now we are poised to make another leap.

"As gut-wrenching as these stories are going to be, we are going to find ways to innovate and adapt, to make meaning out of these separations," said Gary Laderman, a professor of American religious history at Emory University.

When disasters limit mourning, people invent new ways to say goodbye, Dr. Laderman and his peers said. It had happened many times before. The Black Death in Europe caused a high mortality rate among priests, so everyday people stepped in. During the Civil War, American families turned to embalming, to preserve the dead over time and distance, so they could be returned for burial at home. Those efforts helped give rise to the modern funeral industry. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia left many of their victims in mass graves. So the bereaved switched to chanting over the possessions of the departed.

Those shifts were poised to happen before the tragedies hit, the historians said. But the crises accelerated the changes, and they lasted because they filled some shared need. Based on what the historians said, Theresa, your "Art of Dying" class may be more relevant than ever.

"In coming months, we're going to see what else the word funeral can mean," said Amy Cunningham, a funeral director in Brooklyn and a teacher of that course.

Authority figures like funeral directors and clergy members may become less central to the grieving process. "I think we'll see a radical shift in the democratization of authority, who has the right to officiate a funeral," said Priya Parker, the host of a new podcast, called " Together Apart," on how people can still connect during this crisis.

Online funerals may dissolve the constraints of the form: size, location, cost. Eulogies could take on new shape. "We might imagine recorded remarks from loved ones, keeping their social distancing practices, filming words of remembrance at varied sites of significance to the deceased: a back porch rocking chair, a local fishing pond, a beloved hiking trail, the site of a first date," wrote the Rev. Cody J. Sanders, an American Baptist chaplain at Harvard University.

Mourners are likely to place less emphasis on the body of the deceased. "I fear that, in some instances, the only moment that the family will meet the body again is when those cremated remains arrive in the mail," Ms. Cunningham said.

Instead, the focus may be on memorializing that person's life, and finding new ways to signal sorrow. In the 19th century, families had elaborate ways of telling the world they had lost a loved one, down to the texture of black fabric they wore, said Brandy Schillace, a medical historian. Windows were draped in black to mark a death in the home. "You could drive by a house, realize they were in grief and have solidarity with them," she said.

Many of those rituals were abandoned when medicine improved and fewer lives were lost, Dr. Schillace said.

Now, as losses are beginning to mount, so is determination to forge new ways to comfort the bereaved. Volunteers are organizing donations of tablet computers to hospitals so that families in straits like yours will find it easier to share final moments. New grief groups are forming online. Prepare for more transformation in coming weeks, the historians predicted. Social media can turn a new practice into a tradition in 24 hours. Because no one is safe from the coronavirus, mortality is front and center for everyone.

When this crisis is over, some of these changes are likely to endure. Even when it's safe to travel again, many in-person funerals will start to include video conference options for those who are far away, Ms. Cunningham said.

"I don't know that the funeral will ever be the same," she said.

Theresa, you are in the vanguard, even if you never wanted to be. Because of the time you invested in your "Art of Dying" class, you may be better equipped than some. Is it any consolation to think of yourself as part of a historic shift, in a position to find your own solutions and then help others by sharing them? I hope so.

With condolences,

Jodi Kantor
Dilemmas is a new column about dealing with the human quandaries presented by the coronavirus pandemic. Please send yours to dilemmas@nytimes.com.

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'We're Going to See What Else the Word Funeral Can Mean'

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As the coronavirus pandemic limits people's ability to mourn, they are finding new ways to say goodbye. My father died of the coronavirus last week, and I'm not sure how to mourn. No visitors were allowed in the hospital, and my family did not get final goodbyes and I-love-yous, even over the phone.

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A person prays in front of a gravestone in Wuhan, China, in 2011, ahead of Tomb-Sweeping Day, a tradition where Chinese people remove weeds and brush away dirt from their ancestors' graves. This year, thousands of families have yet to bury their dead. (VCG/Getty Images)

For at least two millennia, Chinese people have headed to their ancestors' graves on the 15th day after the spring equinox to remove weeds and brush away dirt, to offer food and wine and paper money so grandma and grandpa can enjoy the afterlife.

Saturday is Tomb-Sweeping Day. But few will be tending to graves this year, despite many recent coronavirus fatalities. Thousands of families, especially those in the outbreak's epicenter of Wuhan, have been unable to bury their dead.

"No one in the family got to say goodbye to grandpa or see his face one last time," said Gao Yingwei, an IT worker in Wuhan whose grandfather, Gao Shixu, succumbed to the novel coronavirus on Feb. 7. The 76-year-old died at home; funeral-home staff in hazmat suits came to collect his body, telling the family it would be cremated immediately.

"To this day, we have no idea how his body was handled, where his ashes are, or when we will be able to pick them up," Gao said. "I don't even know which funeral parlor those guys were from."

Adding to the angst, tomb-sweeping rituals - when huge crowds flock to cemeteries - have been either banned or severely curtailed by authorities nationwide. While a limited number of mourners with reservations will be allowed into graveyards in Beijing and Shanghai, there will be no such gatherings in Wuhan, where the municipal government has banned funeral ceremonies and tomb-sweeping until at least May.

This is ostensibly because of health issues but also reflects Beijing's political desire, experts say, to deny emotional families the chance to get together and complain about the government's handling of the outbreak - a matter of acute sensitivity for the ruling Communist Party.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

The coronavirus pandemic ravaging the globe officially claimed 2,563 lives in Wuhan, where it began in a market that sold exotic animals for consumption. But evidence emerging from the city as it stirs from its two-month hibernation suggests the real death toll is exponentially higher.

Long lines have been forming at funeral homes in Wuhan over the past two weeks, as family members have been informed they may collect their loved ones' remains ahead of Tomb-Sweeping Day. Some waited six hours to collect an urn, then the ashes.

The Hankou Funeral Parlor's crematorium was operating 19 hours a day, with male staff enlisted to help carry bodies. In just two days, the home received 5,000 urns, the respected magazine Caixin reported.

As Wuhan reopens, China revs engine to move past coronavirus. But it's stuck in second gear.

Using photos posted online, social media sleuths have estimated that Wuhan funeral homes had returned 3,500 urns a day since March 23. That would imply a death toll in Wuhan of about 42,000 - or 16 times the official number. Another widely shared calculation, based on Wuhan's 84 furnaces running nonstop and each cremation taking an hour, put the death toll at 46,800.

Wuhan residents say the activities belie the official statistics. "It can't be right . . . because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?" a man, identified only by his surname of Zhang, told Radio Free Asia.

U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded that China's numbers are much lower than they are in reality.

China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Thursday that China has been open and transparent about the coronavirus outbreak, and accused U.S. officials of making "shameless" comments casting doubt on Beijing's accounting of the toll.

Deaths not counted as coronavirus

Grandpa Gao had a fever and difficulty breathing for two weeks, but the family could not obtain medical treatment for him. "That was the darkest and the most chaotic time for Wuhan, and it was every man for himself," his grandson said.

Gao was never tested for the coronavirus, but his family has no doubt that the novel pathogen led to his death. His wife fell sick later in February, when coronavirus tests became more plentiful, and was confirmed as infected. She remains in the hospital.

Other families in Wuhan report similar experiences.

When 49-year-old Liu Cheng died Feb. 12, officially of a "severe infection in both lungs," Liu Xiaobo was given a half-hour to get to the care facility where his brother had lived for five years after being paralyzed.

He didn't make it before his brother was cremated. "It was brutal for us and what they did lacked the most basic respect for the dead," Liu said.

Like Grandpa Gao, Liu Cheng is not included in the official coronavirus statistics. "My brother will forever be among the thousands of nameless dead," Liu Xiaobo said.

Italy's coronavirus deaths are staggering. They may be more preview than anomaly.

Public cemeteries in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province have said their staff will sweep tombs during the memorial period, and some private funeral companies are offering to tend to graves for paying customers, who can watch it live-streamed.

But this robs Chinese families not only of the chance to honor their deceased, but also a rare opportunity to get together for an outing, eating and talking and traveling side by side.

As China has developed, metropolises have built cemeteries on their outskirts to preserve urban land. That means tomb-sweeping is a major undertaking for many that involves traveling a long distance, usually bumper-to-bumper, so families make a day of it.

Funerals go online

Chinese authorities want none of that this year.

Instead, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has told local authorities to "make full use" of online funeral ceremonies and online tomb-sweeping, where people can perform electronic bows and make digital offerings. On the Heavenly Cemetery website, for example, customers can upload photos and videos of their deceased relatives and offer them a virtual glass of baijiu liquor, or light a virtual cigar with a virtual lighter for a few cents.

Fu Shou Yuan, one of China's largest funeral providers, launched an online tomb-sweeping service a few years ago but it wasn't particularly popular. "The epidemic is encouraging more people to have a try," said Zhou Chen, the company's assistant general manager.

A Wuhan family tries to keep its Beijing restaurant afloat in the age of coronavirus

The push toward online memorials promises other benefits for China's Communist rulers. It gives mourners an outlet other than social media, where many have railed against authorities' handling of the coronavirus, and censors have been deleting content they consider disruptive to social stability. It also means fewer people gathering in groups, often a source of anxiety for the country's authoritarian leaders.

"Funerals are a sad time and families might blame local officials for a sudden death, whether it's a car accident or an epidemic," said Andrew Kipnis, a professor of anthropology at Chinese University of Hong Kong who has written a book about Chinese urban funerals.

"Many political movements start with a martyr. There is a strong relationship between grieving and grievance," Kipnis said, noting that the death of a top party official, banished for his liberal views, proved the spark for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

That's a worry for the party, which faced unprecedented criticism over its early response to the coronavirus, especially its efforts to suppress warnings from doctors.

As the disparity between China's official and real death toll draws scrutiny, such political concerns will only become more urgent for China's leaders.

Already, Wuhan families are complaining about the lack of space to mourn.

Chinese families "can do nothing but swallow their grief and indignation," said Wu Akou, a Wuhan woman who lined up for hours to collect ashes, in an online post that has since been deleted.

"I don't get it. We're allowed to post about other countries' tragedies, but not photos of our own dead family members," she wrote, adding that Chinese leaders were trying to "whitewash" the truth about the epidemic.

'Wolf Warrior' strives to make China first with coronavirus vaccine

First, China. Then, Italy. What the U.S. can learn from extreme coronavirus lockdowns.

Locked down in Beijing, I watched China beat back the coronavirus

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

Coronavirus: What you need to read
Updated April 2, 2020

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Chinese families should be sweeping graves now. But thousands still haven't buried their dead.

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For at least two millennia, Chinese people have headed to their ancestors' graves on the 15th day after the spring equinox to remove weeds and brush away dirt, to offer food and wine and paper money so grandma and grandpa can enjoy the afterlife. Saturday is Tomb-Sweeping Day.

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SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. funeral homes are adapting their businesses to social distancing and the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

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SAN FRANCISCO - U.S. funeral homes are adapting their businesses to social distancing and the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

Like companies across the United States, funeral homes and mortuaries are limiting contact with customers in order to avoid spreading the highly contagious respiratory illness, in some cases livestreaming memorial services to extended family and friends.

The state of Washington, the early epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, has outright banned funerals, although burials continue. The pandemic appears to be leading to lost sales of funeral homes' most profitable services, such as elaborate memorials and luxurious coffins.

Shares of the largest U.S. funeral-related companies have tumbled along with Wall Street in recent weeks as investors struggle with uncertainty around the pandemic.

Service Corporation International, which operates over 1,900 funeral homes and cemeteries, has dropped almost 30% from a March 4 record high, and smaller rival Carriage Services Inc has fallen almost the same amount.

Matthews International Corp and Hillenbrand Inc, which both sell caskets and other memorial products, have each fallen over 30% since Feb. 19, when the S&P 500 ended its 11-year bull market. Both stocks have underperformed the S&P 500.

Carriage Services' funeral homes and crematoriums are following local social distancing rules, in some cases video-streaming memorial services. The company is also preparing for a range of potential outcomes related to the spread of the outbreak.

"We have a plan for each one of our 219 businesses out there," Carriage Services President Bill Goetz said, citing the company's focus on safety.

Funeral homes in California, one of several states where people have been ordered to stay indoors, have limited the options they offer and are restricting the number of family members who may gather, even at outdoor graveside ceremonies.

"We do remain open, but we are only doing cremations and burials. We are not offering memorials or any additional services," said Ruby Joyner, manager of C.P. Bannon Mortuary in Oakland.

Joyner said some of her customers hoped to hold memorial services once the outbreak is contained but that many were likely to hold them at churches instead of funeral homes.

STRUGGLE IN 'PRE-SELL' MARKET

Funerals including memorial services typically cost about $9,000, including a casket, while cremations can cost from $1,000, said Barrington Research analyst Alexander Paris.

As well as taking a hit from offering fewer elaborate ceremonies, funeral homes may also struggle to pre-sell packages, a source of sales that some of them have relied on for growth in recent years.

Such "pre-need" customers are typically elderly, and the outbreak may make those people reluctant to leave home or receive visitors because they are worried about becoming sick.

"Pre-need is kind of the driver of these stocks," said Oppenheimer analyst Scott Schneeberger. "Pre-need is also a discretionary spend. Think of the older guy seeing his retirement portfolio take a hit."

In Italy, priests are holding burials without family members amid a backlog of deceased people, while South Korean authorities have urged the families of coronavirus victims to cremate their loved ones first and hold a funeral later.

So far, at least 720 people in the United States have died from the global pandemic, although experts and government officials expect that count to increase dramatically.

A March 16 study by Imperial College in London - published before steps were taken to contain the outbreak, including closing schools and social distancing - predicted that an unmitigated epidemic could lead to 2.2 million deaths in the United States.

While many people eventually will die in the United States from the outbreak, analysts - for now - do not expect the fortunes of funeral homes to significantly improve.

About 2.8 million people died in the United States in 2017, including 56,000 fatalities from influenza and pneumonia, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"If it did pick up and significantly increase the death rate in the U.S. in 2020, I think that would help these stocks, but for the short term, it's the no-public-gathering rules that are going to affect them," Barrington's Paris said.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Megan Davies, Peter Cooney and Lisa Shumaker)

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As Coronavirus Hits Memorial Services, U.S. Funeral Homes Struggle to Adapt

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SAN FRANCISCO - U.S. funeral homes are adapting their businesses to social distancing and the rapidly spreading coronavirus. Like companies across the United States, funeral homes and mortuaries are limiting contact with customers in order to avoid spreading the highly contagious respiratory illness, in some cases livestreaming memorial services to extended family and friends.

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Posted April 01, 2020 07:00:00

For Muslims, cremation is not only prohibited, it's viewed as a desecration of the deceased.

"There remains a connection between the body and soul even in death, so this is something that is quite metaphysical, and it's a very strongly held belief," explains Mariam Ardati, a death doula in the Muslim community.

"To inflict that type of treatment on the body in death, it's quite horrific to even consider."

But as COVID-19 spreads globally, and the fatalities rise, Muslim and Jewish communities alike are being forced to reconsider ancient death and burial rites.

And, according to Ms Ardati, it's causing panic, "because these are rights that are afforded to people in death, just as someone has rights afforded to them while they're alive".

From perfumed shrouds to plastic

When a Muslim person dies, their body is honoured with four rituals.

First, the body is washed - with soapy water, clean water, then camphor-infused water - then it is wrapped in a funeral shroud, perfumed with incense.

"Then there's a communal prayer that's offered for the deceased, and that's when the whole community comes together," explains Ms Ardati..

The fourth rite is that the deceased is buried, not in a coffin, but laid directly onto the earth.

But due to the current pandemic, these Islamic rites are being adapted, even omitted, to prevent the spread of infection.

Last week, the Australian National Imams Council (ANIC), for which Ms Ardati is the funeral and cemeteries adviser, released a statement saying it was permissible for bodies to be buried in leak-proof plastic bags.

This measure was approved by the Islamic body known as the Fatwa Council.

While restrictions are still unfolding, and may vary from state to state, Ms Ardati says some Islamic services have already released statements saying there would be no washing of the deceased.

She adds that others may continue the ritual washing and shrouding, provided staff have access to personal protective equipment.

But given that frontline health staff are running out of necessary equipment, Ms Ardati says it is unlikely funeral service providers will be able to meet demand.

The case against cremation

Internationally, thousands of coronavirus victims are being cremated.

Last week, the UK government recently passed an emergency bill that faith groups feared would enable state authorities to mandate cremation.

While the legislation was amended to respect religious freedoms, the fear of forced cremations remains a real concern for religious groups.

In Argentina, it was reported that local authorities had cremated the first Jewish victim of coronavirus - despite protest from their communities.

Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins from Emanuel Synagogue in Sydney says there is a great deal of similarity between Islamic and Jewish rituals.

"Cremation is prohibited by both traditions," he says. "For us the body is sacred, and burial is a core aspect of how we do it.

"I'm glad that England has made that exception, and I'm sure that would be the policy here in Australia as well - without endangering health."

Ms Ardati agrees that enforced cremation would be "unfathomable" for the Muslim community.

"The way the body is treated throughout the [death] rituals is of the utmost respect," she says.

"We can't even cut nails, we can't cut any hair off of the body, we have to leave it exactly the way we receive it."

Jewish cantor Michel Laloum says cremation is not strictly ruled out in the progressive Judaism movement.

But he says some Jews also oppose cremation for historical reasons - "the argument is, 'people have cremated enough of us, why would we cremate any further people?'" - while others feel it is their right to be cremated.

"My grandfather said: 'It was good enough for the rest of my family, it's good enough for me,'" Mr Laloum recalls.

"He's the one who went through the Holocaust, he's the one who lost his parents, his siblings his uncles, his aunts ... so no-one has the right to gainsay his decision."

Defending the community

While coronavirus is forcing religious funeral workers to adapt, Islam is flexible in times of need, says Musharraf Hussain, a UK-based academic and translator of The Majestic Quran.

"Just two people can conduct the funeral prayer if necessary, and corpses are not always washed," he says.

Dr Hussain adds there is an interesting parallel that martyrs - those who die defending the community - do not have their bodies washed.

"Those who die in a plague are considered martyrs, according to the Hadith," he says.

"This may indicate that those who die in a plague have sacrificed themselves to allow the community to become immune to the disease."

Although Islamic rituals may be altered, Ms Ardati says on a practical level, families who lose a loved one may feel bereft.

"When you're taking [away] a ritual that has a lot of honour attached to it, it's going to interrupt that grieving process," she says.

"By not allowing families to be involved in the rituals, or denying people the rituals altogether, [it] presents a whole new face of grief for the community."

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Why coronavirus presents a 'new face of grief' for Muslims and Jews

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Posted April 01, 2020 07:00:00 For Muslims, cremation is not only prohibited, it's viewed as a desecration of the deceased. "There remains a connection between the body and soul even in death, so this is something that is quite metaphysical, and it's a very strongly held belief," explains Mariam Ardati, a death doula in the Muslim community.

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Chief Coroner's Guidance on COVID-19

26 March 2020

This document is intended to be the main piece of Guidance for all coroners from the Chief Coroner about the approach to COVID-19

The Guidance applies to reports of death and coroner investigations in England and Wales only (the extent of the Chief Coroner’s remit). It does not apply to coroners in Northern Ireland and it does not apply in Scotland (which does not have coroners).

This Guidance is designed to help coroners continue to exercise their judicial decisions independently and in accordance with the law, but in the context of the extraordinary pressures which are present.

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YouTube video from Pia Interlandi, dresser of the dead, on creative rituals

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Mortuary employees wearing face masks bury a coronavirus victim in Madrid. Spain now has even more restrictive lockdown measures in place Photograph: Baldesca Samper/AFP via Getty Images

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Army medical staff clears the coffins in the church of San Giuseppe in Seriate and transports them with the use of five Army trucks killed by COVID19 Coronavirus Coronavirus outbreak, Seriate, Italy - 28 Mar 2020 Photograph: Carlo Cozzoli/REX/Shutterstock

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Coronavirus has short-circuited life as Americans have come to know it across the country, but on Friday it began to cast a shadow on death itself.

The Department of Veterans Affairs said it would suspend military honors with burials at the nation's 142 veteran's cemeteries starting Monday and limit the number of people who could attend graveside services to 10 immediate family members.

The decision applies only to VA cemeteries across the United States and in Puerto Rico, and not to burials in private cemeteries. Fort Sam Houston Cemetery's director, Aubrey David, said the service branches will provide honors for a deceased veteran at any cemetery at the family's request as long as the service has the manpower.

He added, however, that he did not know if Defense Department practices had changed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Final honors include the firing of three rifle volleys and the playing of taps, with a service detail folding the flag that draped the casket and presenting it to the family of the deceased.

The VA, in a statement, said all of its cemeteries would remain open though parts of them might close, including public information centers or chapels. Family members could witness interment by request. Those wanting to make burial arrangements at any VA national cemetery can call the national cemetery scheduling office at (800) 535-1117.

"VA national cemeteries will continue to perform our essential function - to inter veterans and eligible individuals," said Randy Reeves, the agency's undersecretary for memorial affairs. "We trust the public understands that we must place priority on the health and safety of veterans and families and our team members who serve them."

The last burials with military honors at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery for the duration of the pandemic crisis took place Friday. On any given day the cemetery, one of the busiest in the United States and the ninth-largest with more than 160,000 people buried there, conducts on average 16 burials .

Fort Sam's assistant director, Roshanda Bost, said "direct" burials in which a funeral home or family would take remains to the cemetery for interment without services would begin Monday. Families also can arrange to schedule services after the coronavirus threat ends.

"Any family that has a direct burial during this time frame can call us back after coronavirus is over and they can schedule a memorial service at one of our committal shelters so they can render military honors," David, the cemetery director, said.

It wasn't immediately clear if the VA had ever before stopped holding services with honors at its cemeteries.

"The only time I can remember a cemetery being closed was when we had a hurricane in Houston, and that was only a day," said David. "We did some tree removals off the streets so the cemetery was accessible and then the very next day we were conducting committal services."

sigc@express-news.net

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Burials with honors, a staple of life in 'Military City, U.S.A.,' will stop because of coronavirus

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Coronavirus has short-circuited life as Americans have come to know it across the country, but on Friday it began to cast a shadow on death itself. The Department of Veterans Affairs said it would suspend military honors with burials at the nation's 142 veteran's cemeteries starting Monday and limit the number of people who could attend graveside services to 10 immediate family members.

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A fake funeral to break curfew? #funerals

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A ‘Palestinian-style’ fake funeral in #Jordan, to break the #CoronaVirus curfew. 🚷🇯🇴

Watch what happens when they hear police sirens 🚨😂

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A ‘Palestinian-style’ fake funeral in #Jordan, to break the #CoronaVirus curfew. 🚷🇯🇴

Watch what happens when they hear police sirens 🚨😂
https://t.co/UuMUj4kge7

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A ‘Palestinian-style’ fake funeral in #Jordan, to break the #CoronaVirus curfew. 🚷🇯🇴

Watch what happens when they hear police sirens 🚨😂https://t.co/UuMUj4kge7
— Mark Halawa - مارك حلاوه (@HalawaMark) March 26, 2020

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A ‘Palestinian-style’ fake funeral in #Jordan, to break the #CoronaVirus curfew. 🚷🇯🇴

Watch what happens when they hear police sirens 🚨😂
https://t.co/UuMUj4kge7

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
A ‘Palestinian-style’ fake funeral in #Jordan, to break the #CoronaVirus curfew. 🚷🇯🇴

Watch what happens when they hear police sirens 🚨😂
https://t.co/UuMUj4kge7

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
A ‘Palestinian-style’ fake funeral in #Jordan, to break the #CoronaVirus curfew. 🚷🇯🇴

Watch what happens when they hear police sirens 🚨😂

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Satellite images show Iran building burial pits for coronavirus victims | CNN

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Iran has been rapidly expanding a major cemetery in Qom, the area worst hit by the country’s novel coronavirus outbreak, satellite images obtained by CNN reveal.

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The Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre could become a massive makeshift intensive care hospital, treating hundreds of seriously ill coronavirus patients under a plan being considered by the state government.

Government and industry sources with knowledge of the plans told The Age that preparations were also under way to use part of the riverside landmark as a temporary morgue to store what is feared could be a large number of bodies of victims of the pandemic.

Jeff's Shed: the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. Credit:Matthew Piper

Victoria's government is bracing for up to 2000 intensive care admissions at the peak of the pandemic here, expected in late May or early June. The state only had about 475 ICU beds before the crisis developed, compared with about 875 in NSW.

The conversion of the Convention Centre, known to locals as Jeff's Shed after former premier Jeff Kennett, would follow the lead of other cities including New York and London, which have re-tooled similar structures to treat large numbers of coronavirus patients.

The vast ExCel centre in London's Docklands is expected to be ready to take the first of up to 500 patients within days.

During the Spanish flu epidemic in 1919, 35 temporary hospitals were set up around Victoria including the Melbourne Exhibition Buildings, which treated about 1500 patients at a time.

The escalating coronavirus pandemic is also expected to overwhelm the state's morgue capacity which could not cope with the numbers of bodies from the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. Temporary refrigerated storage had to be set up in the car park of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine during that crisis.

Premier Daniel Andrews and Health Minister Jenny Mikakos have been frank about the need for more capacity to treat the large numbers of critically ill people expected in the present pandemic and have reopened wards at the old Peter McCallum hospital in East Melbourne and fast-tracked new beds at Casey Hospital.

As the crisis deepened on Thursday with the state's first three COVID-19 deaths confirmed, amid 520 cases of illness, Ms Mikakos confirmed that care capacity in "non-hospital settings" was in the planning stages but would not say which buildings were being considered.

"We are looking at both hospital settings and non-hospital settings for additional bed capacity we may require," Ms Mikakos said.

Hospital beds in the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton during the influenza pandemic. Credit:Museums Victoria

"I'm not in a position to make announcements about that today but we're definitely looking at other opportunities to expand that capacity further."

The management of the Convention Centre would not comment and referred questions back to the Department of Health Human Services.

The state government refused to confirm whether the convention centre would be used as temporary hospital.

"The department is undertaking a range of contingency planning looking at health and possible non-health settings that could be used to create extra capacity if needed," a government spokeswoman said on Thursday.

The venue shut its doors to the public on March 16 in the wake of the Victorian government's state of emergency declarations which banned indoor gatherings of more than 100 people.

The 70,000 square metre centre, which dominates the South Bank of the Yarra at the western edge of Melbourne's CBD, was built in 1995 and earned its nickname for the complex's distinctive appearance and for Mr Kennett's decision to abandon plans for a museum on the site and build a convention centre instead.

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Noel Towell is State Political Editor for The Age

Rob Harris is the National Affairs Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based at Parliament House in Canberra

Benjamin is a state political reporter

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'Jeff's Shed' earmarked for giant COVID-19 hospital and morgue

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Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre could become a massive makeshift intensive care hospital, treating hundreds of seriously ill coronavirus patients under a plan being considered by the state government.

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West Kerry community line a funeral route with cars maintaining social distance but also paying respects.

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There were poignant scenes in a small parish in the west Kerry Gaeltacht yesterday as a community found a powerful way to pay their respects to a grieving family.

Due to Covid-19 social distancing restrictions, the Ryan family was unable to have a traditional wake and the community was not permitted to enter the church in Baile an Fheirtéaraigh.

However, the local community rallied around the family as people lined the 2km road between Baile an Fheirtéaraigh church and the local graveyard, while maintaining social distance, and said a final farewell to Betty Ryan.

It was a moving display of community solidarity, which had its origins in a message posted on social media the previous evening.

Tor Cotton said the guard of honour was a fitting tribute by a community that is very much attached to the traditional rituals of death and wakes.

"Death and wakes are so central to community life here in west Kerry and people were frustrated that this pandemic was preventing them to pay their respects to a wonderful woman and her family."

"In a Gaeltacht community such as this the process of lamenting the loss of a member of that community is handled by the community. Being unable to have a wake or enter the church is extremely difficult for the family."

"We decided to send out a message on social media and by text and people just embraced the idea. But we stressed it could only works if people respected social distancing."

In a Facebook post this morning Carol Ryan, Betty's daughter, expressed the profound sense of comfort and gratitude felt by the family on witnessing the display of community solidarity.

She said: "Very hard to find the words to say thank you to all of you in the community for yesterday.

"We felt every hug and every handshake in each of your faces on that journey to the graveyard. Mam would be so proud and so happy for us to have that support. Thank you all."

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Community pays respect to parishioner amid restrictions

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There were poignant scenes in a small parish in the west Kerry Gaeltacht yesterday as a community found a powerful way to pay their respects to a grieving family. Due to Covid-19 social distancing restrictions, the Ryan family was unable to have a traditional wake and the community was not permitted to enter the church in Baile an Fheirtéaraigh.

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'A generation has died': Italian province struggles to bury its coronavirus dead

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Coffins awaiting burial are lining up in churches and the corpses of those who died at home are being kept in sealed-off rooms for days as funeral services struggle to cope in Bergamo, the Italian province hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

As of Wednesday, Covid-19 had killed 2,978 across Italy, all buried or cremated without ceremony. Those who die in hospital do so alone, with their belongings left in bags beside coffins before being collected by funeral workers.

In Bergamo, a province of 1.2 million people in the Lombardy region, where 1,959 of the total deaths in the country have taken place, 4,305 people had contracted the virus by Wednesday. The death toll across the province is unclear, but the situation has become so intense that on Wednesday night the army was brought in to move 65 coffins from the cemetery in Bergamo town and take them to Modena and Bologna in Emilia-Romagna.

The army intervenes to move bodies from the main cemetery in Bergamo town. Photograph: Foto #;Sergio Agazzi/REX/Shutterstock

CFB, the area's largest funeral director, has carried out almost 600 burials or cremations since 1 March.

"In a normal month we would do about 120," said Antonio Ricciardi, the president of CFB. "A generation has died in just over two weeks. We've never seen anything like this and it just makes you cry."

There are about 80 funeral companies across Bergamo, each receiving dozens of calls an hour. A shortage of coffins as providers struggle to keep up with demand and funeral workers becoming infected with the virus are also hampering preparations.

Hospitals have adopted more stringent rules regarding the handling of the dead, who need to be placed in a coffin straight away without being clothed due to the risk of infection posed by their bodies. "Families can't see their loved ones or give them a proper funeral. This is a big problem on a psychological level," said Ricciardi. "But also because many of our staff are ill, we don't have as many people to transport and prepare the bodies."

A cemetery employee closes the gates behind a hearse at the Monumental cemetery of Bergamo. Photograph: Piero Cruciatti/AFP via Getty Images

For those who die at home, the bureaucratic process is lengthier as deaths need to be certified by two doctors. The second is a specialist who would ordinarily have to certify the death no later than 30 hours after a person has passed away.

"So you have to wait for both doctors to come and at this time, many of them are also ill," added Ricciardi.

Stella, a teacher in Bergamo, shared the story of one of the deceased with the Guardian. "Yesterday, an 88-year-old man died," she said. "He'd had a fever for a few days. There was no way to call an ambulance because the line was always busy. He died alone in his room. The ambulance arrived an hour later. Obviously, nothing could be done. And since no coffins were available in Bergamo, they left him on the bed and sealed his room to keep his relatives from entering until a coffin could be found."

Adding to the torment is the fact that relatives cannot visit their loved ones in hospital, or give them proper funerals.

"Usually you would be able to dress them and they would stay one night in the family home. None of this is happening," said Alessandro, whose 74-year-old uncle died in Codogno, the Lombardy town where the outbreak began. "You can't even see them to say goodbye, this is the most devastating part."

The harrowing impact of the virus on Bergamo can be gleaned from the obituary section of the local newspaper L'Eco di Bergamo. On Friday, reader Giovanni Locatelli shared online footage comparing the newspaper's obituary section on 9 February, when listings took up just one page, to a copy dated 13 March, when 10 pages were needed to commemorate the dead. On Sunday, Il Messaggero posted a video of coffins lined up in a church.

"We have asked for support from funeral companies nationally as deaths have risen exponentially," said Pietro Bonaldi, the director of Lia, a business association in Bergamo. "We have reached capacity. And unfortunately, in recent days a lot of funeral workers have become sick with the virus and so can't work."

Elsewhere in Italy, there have been cases of funeral companies refusing to take bodies, for example in Naples, where the body of Teresa Franzese, 47, was kept at home for almost two days before it was collected.

All religious ceremonies, including funerals, masses and weddings, are banned amid the lockdown. However, two priests, one near Venice and another in the southern Campania region, were charged for officiating a funeral.

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'A generation has died': Italian province struggles to bury its coronavirus dead

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Coffins awaiting burial are lining up in churches and the corpses of those who died at home are being kept in sealed-off rooms for days as funeral services struggle to cope in Bergamo, the Italian province hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. As of Wednesday, Covid-19 had killed 2,978 across Italy, all buried or cremated without ceremony.

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UK funeral directors may stream burials of coronavirus victims

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Funeral directors are considering streaming burials over Facebook for the families of coronavirus victims as part of measures discussed with government officials.

Civil servants were also pressed over the need for staff and morticians to be instructed to wear full-body protective clothing while handling victims' bodies in a call with representatives of the UK's undertakers.

Quick guide
What to do if you have coronavirus symptoms in the UK

Symptoms are defined by the NHS as either:

a high temperature - you feel hot to touch on your chest or back

a new continuous cough - this means you've started coughing repeatedly

NHS advice is that anyone with symptoms should stay at home for at least 7 days.

If you live with other people, they should stay at home for at least 14 days, to avoid spreading the infection outside the home.

After 14 days, anyone you live with who does not have symptoms can return to their normal routine. But, if anyone in your home gets symptoms, they should stay at home for 7 days from the day their symptoms start. Even if it means they're at home for longer than 14 days.

If you live with someone who is 70 or over, has a long-term condition, is pregnant or has a weakened immune system, try to find somewhere else for them to stay for 14 days.

If you have to stay at home together, try to keep away from each other as much as possible.

After 7 days, if you no longer have a high temperature you can return to your normal routine.
If you still have a high temperature, stay at home until your temperature returns to normal.
If you still have a cough after 7 days, but your temperature is normal, you do not need to continue staying at home. A cough can last for several weeks after the infection has gone.

Staying at home means you should:

not go to work, school or public areas

not use public transport or taxis

not have visitors, such as friends and family, in your home

not go out to buy food or collect medicine - order them by phone or online, or ask someone else to drop them off at your home

You can use your garden, if you have one. You can also leave the house to exercise - but stay at least 2 metres away from other people.

If you have symptoms of coronavirus, use the NHS 111 coronavirus service to find out what to do.
Source: NHS England on 23 March 2020

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The government is expected to bring forward legislation this week to help funeral directors handle thousands of deaths expected from the Covid-19 virus. It follows concerns raised by pathologists that current legislation allows coronavirus victims to have open coffins and have their bodies embalmed while remaining contagious.

The National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors and the National Association of Funeral Directors were among organisations which coordinated a conference call with the Cabinet Office on Tuesday.

According to sources one suggestion raised with government officials was to encourage mourners to stream funerals over social media to friends and family.

Modern crematoriums tend to be equipped to broadcast funerals via the internet to mourners living abroad. Funeral directors believe that social distancing and self-isolation could see more people take up this option. Family members who do attend could be advised to stand further apart during a funeral service, or limit numbers.

There were also calls for the government to give funeral directors access to personal protection equipment if they are removing bodies from homes where someone is suspected of having died from Covid-19.

Burials could also take place with a memorial at a later date, according to Alison Crake, a funeral director who helped draw up the nationwide pandemic plan for the funeral industry.

"The likelihood is a family will be self-isolating immediately after someone has died. We are concerned about inconsistencies which is making it very difficult for us to give advice. It may be that a family takes a decision to have a smaller service now and a memorial service at a later date," said Crake, who did not take part in Tuesday's meeting.

She said it was "natural instinct" for people grieving the death of a loved one to reach out and comfort each other and the government needed to clarify what would be a safe way to congregate in the case of a funeral.

"A traditional funeral where you expect people to go into a venue, a church, a crematorium chapel - if you think of the advice on social distancing and if you think what happens at the funeral, it's a very natural instinct to comfort people and have your family close to you.

"We need to think about what advice we give people to help [them] understand where there is different advice in terms of older people. Earlier start times for burials are also likely, with the usually unpopular 9am slots likely to be filled," she said.

Crake's guidance suggests all staff removing an infected body should wear a long-sleeved gown, goggles and a face mask.

The Association of Anatomical Pathology Technology (AAPT), which represents morticians, is seeking urgent clarification from Public Health England (PHE) over the rules of handling the bodies of coronavirus victims.

A leaked email from the organisation said: "AAPT are aware of the latest guidance stating that body bags are not required and that viewing, hygienic preparation, viewing and embalming are all permitted. We are urgently trying to clarify this guidance with PHE, especially around body bags and personal protective clothing."

The Irish Association of Funeral Directors provoked criticism last week when it said all funeral services for coronavirus victims should be postponed, and the deceased brought straight to the crematorium or cemetery for committal. It also recommended banning family members from funeral homes and limousines for transport.

The British government has been reluctant to put a definitive figure on the number of potential Covid-19 deaths in the months ahead. On Monday, modelling from Imperial College suggested that the government's new action plan might reduce the estimated number of deaths from 260,000 to 20,000.

Asked to comment on the suggested measures discussed with civil servants, a government spokesperson said: "We have been clear from the outset that we expect coronavirus to impact the UK, which is why we are undertaking sensible contingency planning for every eventuality - including the reasonable worst-case scenario."
Topics

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UK funeral directors may stream burials of coronavirus victims

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Funeral directors are considering streaming burials over Facebook for the families of coronavirus victims as part of measures discussed with government officials. Civil servants were also pressed over the need for staff and morticians to be instructed to wear full-body protective clothing while handling victims' bodies in a call with representatives of the UK's undertakers.

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Social distancing, self-isolation and other measures are changing death. Find out How Funerals and Grief are Changing in the Age of Coronavirus.

With all the new regulations coming out regarding social distancing and isolation during the coronavirus pandemic, the way we deal with death and grief is changing. These changes are not limited to people dying from the virus itself - it is affecting how we can respond and react to people in our communities dying from other "natural causes."

We often turn to rituals during bereavement, including religious observances, public funerals, wakes, viewings or shivas, all of which are now being drastically changed, canceled or postponed.

We talk about the importance of being together and present when someone has died, but what can we do when we are literally banned from being physically present at a funeral or wake? How is self-isolation and quarantining from COVID-19 affecting grief and memorialization?

How Funerals and Grief are Changing in the Age of Coronavirus

Social Distancing and Funerals

In Canada right now, funerals are limited to 50 people. Some provinces and US states are limiting the number allowed to gather to 10 people, which is expected to soon be restricted to no family or guests in attendance at all. One way funeral homes are dealing with this is to live stream funeral services.

Other places around the world are seeing similar levels of restrictions. In Ireland, where large social gatherings are an essential ritual seen practiced in the Irish Wake, the country is imposing similar strict attendance regulations to Canada and the US.

"People are dying away from their families because hospitals and nursing homes won't let people in. Death right now is very isolating which in turn is affecting how we grieve."

In Italy, one of the countries that has been hit the hardest by coronavirus, religious institutions and the government are taking more extreme measures . With the alarmingly high rate of deaths in the country, there are waiting lists for burials, funerals have been fully restricted and shut down by the government, and crematoriums are now operating around the clock. They have even gone as far to close cemeteries as to not tempt mourners to gather at a graveside.

The Impact of Coronavirus on Funeral Service

The initial impact of COVID-19 is already clear: we cannot gather together in person to mourn the death of a loved one. Lauren Leroy, funeral director and blogger at Little Miss Funeral, points out that circumstances in the funeral profession are changing on almost a daily basis.

"It started off with us only being able to have half capacity in the funeral home, to now only having private family viewings and family only in churches. A lot of families are opting for cremation with memorials to be held once things settle down."

This rapid change can also mean that one day a family makes a plan with the funeral home, but then those plans have to be drastically changed.

"You have a family leave the funeral home thinking they're going to have a certain kind of service and then we call them a few days later telling them that because of the virus we have to change things." Leroy goes on to add, "It's horrible. It complicates grief even more so I think. You are losing the sense of community because we can't gather to support each other."

Cole Imperi, a thanatologist from Cincinnati, OH - and friend of TalkDeath - spoke to us about the role of community and mourning.

"The act of a community coming together to collectively mourn is something our brains have literally evolved to do and need. It's powerful medicine to see your family and friends show up for you at a funeral. It's powerful medicine to cry together."

The ritual of the funeral plays a large role in how we process our grief because it is how we receive support from our social community. Add to this the fact we cannot visit our dying loved ones, and it becomes even more complex to navigate, as Cole adds:

"People are dying away from their families because hospitals and nursing homes won't let people in. Death right now is very isolating which in turn is affecting how we grieve."

So what can we do to help ourselves, and each other, grieve?

Coping With Grief During Coronavirus

Cole has some advice for how we can get through this. As a thanatologist, a central part of her work is to "preserve and prioritize the community connection around mourning rituals." One of the ways she does this is to encourage people to identify the ways they can still have this community connection.

She advises people to "focus on what you can do, make a list of what you want for a funeral or memorial, and you may discover with some help and ingenuity it can all happen." This involves being flexible with how you approach different key aspects of a funeral. For example, instead of a viewing you can live stream online.

The way we grieve has changed from the foreseeable future. In this difficult time of social distancing, we need to find other ways to reach out and connect with one another.

Lack of control is our worst enemy right now. This comes from the normal impact of grief, but is made more complicated by the restrictions that are being implemented in our daily lives. These restrictions are for the greater good of course, but if you are mourning and already feeling a lack of control, this just exacerbates the issue.

Cole broke down her advice on how to cope with crisis management and handle our grief in three points.

1. Know that you DO have agency in your life, and you DO have things in your control. You may need to make a list to really see that, and that's OK. Our 'fear' brain wants to keep telling you that you have no control. Don't listen!

2. Freewrite every day. Research shows that the act of putting pen to paper and writing WHATEVER mess out is therapeutic. The act of turning all 100 million of your thoughts into something tangible, into something physical (ink on paper) reduces symptoms of anxiety and stress and decreases heart rate. The best part of this is that kids can do this too.

3. Set an intention for this period of time. That doesn't mean 'push yourself into productivity' it just means, assign this period of time a theme word or a simple intention. Setting an intention like this gives you a framework for this period of time that is INTERNAL, which means coming from you, and not from an external source.

By regaining some control within ourselves we can better deal with our grief. But, thanks to our connected world, there are other things you can do now that can help.

How to Stay Connected During COVID-19

Utilize the technology we have to reach out and connect to those who are grieving. Video calls are a great way to connect, or even just picking up the phone to call each other directly. We can also text or email a loved one and let them know you are here for them. Don't worry about texting and emailing being impersonal! With social distancing being the norm these days, your loved one will not only understand, they will appreciate it. Even a small sympathy note can go a long way. You can also consider joining an online grief forum , or even creating an online memorial .

The way we grieve has changed from the foreseeable future. In the past we would gather together with our friends and family. In this difficult time of social distancing, we need to find other ways to reach out and connect with one another. One way we can do this is by taking advantage of the technological tools at our disposal. Modern technology gives us the option to connect in real time and help narrow the gap between us. Reach out to each other, and be kind.

If you have more questions about mourning, or how funerals and grief are changing in the age of coronavirus, please let us know. You can also check out The Order of The Good Death's FAQ piece on burials and funerals , though remember these are based on American regulations as set by the CDC.

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how funerals and grief are changing in the age of coronavirus

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How Funerals and Grief are Changing in the Age of Coronavirus

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Social distancing, self-isolation and other measures are changing death. Find out How Funerals and Grief are Changing in the Age of Coronavirus. With all the new regulations coming out regarding social distancing and isolation during the coronavirus pandemic, the way we deal with death and grief is changing.

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Italy has banned funerals because of the coronavirus crisis. For many, the virus is now robbing families of the chance to say a final goodbye.

"This pandemic kills twice," says Andrea Cerato, who works in a funeral home in Milan. "First, it isolates you from your loved ones right before you die. Then, it doesn't allow anyone to get closure."

"Families are devastated and find it hard to accept."

'They have no choice but to trust us'

In Italy, many victims of Covid-19 are dying in hospital isolation without any family or friends. Visits are banned because the risk of contagion is too high.

While health authorities say the virus cannot be transmitted posthumously, it can still survive on clothes for a few hours. This means corpses are being sealed away immediately.

"So many families ask us if they can see the body one last time. But it's forbidden," says Massimo Mancastroppa, an undertaker in Cremona.

Lessons from Italy's lockdown

Life in Rome under coronavirus lockdown

The dead cannot be buried in their finest and favourite clothes. Instead, it is the grim anonymity of a hospital gown.

But Massimo is doing what he can.

"We put the clothes the family gives us on top of the corpse, as if they were dressed," he says. "A shirt on top, a skirt below."

In this unprecedented situation undertakers are suddenly finding themselves acting as replacement families, replacement friends, even replacement priests.

People close to those who die from the virus will often be in quarantine themselves.

"We take on all responsibility for them," says Andrea. "We send the loved ones a photo of the coffin that will be used, we then pick up the corpse from the hospital and we bury it or cremate it. They have no choice but to trust us."

The hardest thing for Andrea is not being able to ease the suffering of the bereaved. Instead of telling families all the things he can do, he is now forced to list everything he is no longer allowed to do.

"We can't dress them up, we can't brush their hair, we can't put make up on them. We can't make them look nice and peaceful. It is very sad."

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Andrea has been an undertaker for 30 years, just like his father before him. He says small things are usually important for the bereaved.

"Caressing their cheek one last time, holding their hand, and seeing them look dignified. Not being able to do that is so traumatic."

In this time of virus, undertakers are often forced to meet grieving families either side of a closed door.

Relatives still try to pass on handwritten notes, family heirlooms, drawings and poems in the hope they will buried alongside their mother or father, brother or sister, son or daughter.

But not one of these things will be put in the coffins.

Burying personal items is now illegal. A drastic measure but one designed to stop the spread of the disease.

If someone dies at home, undertakers are still allowed inside - but they have to come in wearing full protective gear: glasses, masks, gloves, coats. It is a deeply distressing sight for someone who's just seen a loved one die.

But many undertakers are now in quarantine themselves. Some have had to close their business. A big worry is that those who handle the dead don't have sufficient masks or gloves.

"We have enough protective gear to keep us going for another week," says Andrea.

"But when we run out, we will not be able to operate. And we are one of the biggest funeral homes in the country. I can't even imagine how the rest are coping."

An emergency national law has now banned funeral services in Italy to prevent the spread of the virus. This is unprecedented for a country with such strong Roman Catholic values.

At least once a day, Andrea buries a body and not even one person shows up to say goodbye - because everyone is in quarantine.

"One or two people are allowed to be there during burial, but that's all," Massimo says. "No-one feels able to say a few words, and so it is just silence."

Whenever he can, he tries to avoid that. So he drives to a church with the coffin in the car, opens the boot, and asks a priest to perform a blessing there and then.

It is often done in seconds. And then the next person awaits.

A country inundated with coffins

Italy's mortuary industry is overwhelmed and the number of dead keeps rising. Almost 7,000 people have been killed by the virus so far (24 March) - more than any other country in the world.

"There's a queue outside our funeral home in Cremona," says Andrea. "It's almost like a supermarket."

Hospital morgues in northern Italy are inundated.

"The chapel at the hospital in Cremona looks more like a warehouse," says Massimo.

Caskets are piling up in churches. In Bergamo, which has the highest number of cases in Italy, the military has had to step in because the city's cemeteries are now full.

One night last week, locals watched in silence as a convoy of army trucks slowly drove more than 70 coffins through the streets.

Each one contained the body of a friend or neighbour being taken to a nearby city to be cremated. Few images have been more shocking or poignant since the outbreak began.

Doctors and nurses across the country have been hailed as heroes, saviours in Italy's darkest hour. But funeral directors have not received recognition for what they too are doing.

"Many people see us as merely transporters of souls," Massimo sighs.

He says many Italians look at their work in the way they view that of Charon, the sinister mythological ferryman of the underworld who carries the souls of the newly deceased across a river dividing the world of the living from the world of the dead.

A thankless and unthinking task in the eyes of many.

"But I can assure you that all we want is to give dignity to the dead."

#Andratuttobene - "everything is going to be ok" - is a hashtag that has been trending in Italy since the crisis erupted. It's accompanied with a rainbow emoji.

But at the moment there is no sunshine in sight. And although all pray for it, no-one knows exactly when everything will indeed be ok once again.

* Illustrations by Jilla Dastmalchi

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Why families in Italy can't say goodbye to the dead

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Italy has banned funerals because of the coronavirus crisis. For many, the virus is now robbing families of the chance to say a final goodbye. "This pandemic kills twice," says Andrea Cerato, who works in a funeral home in Milan. "First, it isolates you from your loved ones right before you die.

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France has imposed limits on the number of people allowed to attend funerals during the confinement aimed at reducing the spread of Covid-19, whether or not the person died of the coronavirus.

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France has imposed limits on the number of people allowed to attend funerals during the confinement aimed at reducing the spread of Covid-19, whether or not the person died of the coronavirus.

Religious sites are allowed to stay open during France's lockdown, but no gatherings are allowed, except for funerals, which have been limited to avoid the spread of the virus between attendees.

Only close family members are allowed in cemeteries or crematoriums, with a limit of 20 people, according to the new confinement directive published Tuesday. But in practice, crowds have been smaller - with travel restrictions in place, few are able to attend.

The French Muslim council suggests those organising funerals contact local local authorities to make sure they are following the latest regulations, as some jurisdictions are limiting numbers drastically.

In and around the city of Mulhouse, in the east of France, which has been the most hit by the epidemic, funeral homes have been ordered to bury or cremate bodies immediately, without any ceremony or anyone in attendance.

Funeral homes are among businesses considered essential, allowed to stay open during the confinement. For people who have died from the virus, their bodies are put directly into coffins, which are immediately sealed and cannot be opened before interment or cremation. This means the body cannot be washed, dressed or offered for a wake.

The funeral home federation has called on authorities to authorise access to face masks for those preparing bodies, even those without the virus. For example, pacemakers are required to be removed, to avoid polluting the ground or exploding during cremation.

Restrictions have required a modification in mourning. No hugs or handshakes for comfort. People are inventing new rituals, like lighting candles. And many are hoping for more elaborate memorial services after the confinement measures have lifted.

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Limited number of mourners allowed at funerals in France during coronavirus lockdown

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France has imposed limits on the number of people allowed to attend funerals during the confinement aimed at reducing the spread of Covid-19, whether or not the person died of the coronavirus. Religious sites are allowed to stay open during France's lockdown, but no gatherings are allowed, except for funerals, which have been limited to avoid the spread of the virus between attendees.

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Coronavirus (COVID-19) – Advice for funeral directors

This information sheet includes:

handling of bodies

infection control procedures and personal protective equipment

transportation

embalming of bodies

advice for religious or ceremonial preparation and funeral practices

cremation of bodies

body viewing

how to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 at a funeral

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Australian Government Department of Health

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Downloads

Advice for funeral directors (COVID-19)

We aim to provide documents in an accessible format. If you're having problems using a document with your accessibility tools, please contact us for help.

This information sheet includes:

handling of bodies

infection control procedures and personal protective equipment

transportation

embalming of bodies

advice for religious or ceremonial preparation and funeral practices

cremation of bodies

body viewing

how to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 at a funeral

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coronavirus (COVID-19) - Advice for funeral directors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We aim to provide documents in an accessible format. If you're having problems using a document with your accessibility tools, please contact us for help.

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The share price of Australia’s largest funeral provider has plummeted after the Prime Minister publicly announced funeral attendance restrictions of just 10 people because of measures to minimise the transmission of Coronavirus. This figure includes the priest or celebrant, funeral directors and cemetery workers. In reality, we’re talking about six or seven mourners.

#funerals #industry

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A quirky yet practical look at the inevitable.

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The share price of Australia's largest funeral provider has plummeted after the Prime Minister publicly announced funeral attendance restrictions of just 10 people because of measures to minimise the transmission of Coronavirus. This figure includes the priest or celebrant, funeral directors and cemetery workers. In reality, we're talking about six or seven mourners.

Invocare's share price has plummeted after the Prime Minister announced that just 10 people, including the celebrant and funeral directors, could be present at a funeral.

But Invocare has been quick in its attempt to communicate to the market that funerals will still going ahead, albeit from a distance.

In a statement to the ASX, Martin Earp, Invocare Chief Executive Officer InvoCare has reassured families that Invocare's funeral homes will continue to arrange funeral and memorial services.

"We have live streaming / webcast and recording capabilities available in many locations. We want to ensure those family, friends and colleagues who are unable to attend a funeral service due to the current social distancing and quarantine requirements that they feel part of the farewell. We are focusing on the introduction of services to meet the needs of client families amidst the restrictions on social gatherings," he said.

Invocare owns hundreds of funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoria in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

You'll note the large share price jump in late February when word of the coronavirus and its predicted impacts started getting serious. This jump coincided with Invocare releasing its 2019 results which were positive (if you're an investor).

"2019 results have seen a strong bounce back ... driven by the number of deaths increasing ... deaths up 2.9% against a drop of 3.3% in 2018."

(It's not uncommon for the share market to react to anticipated changes in rates of death. Last year I blogged about how the predicted flu season affected profit estimates of Invocare. And, as mentioned above, the predictions proved accurate - hence the positive 2019 results.)

Propel Funeral Partners, the lesser known but still significant funeral provider in Australia, has suffered similar losses.

Australia's second largest funeral provider, Propel Funeral Providers has lost ground on the share market too.

I spoke with Carly Dalton from Greenhaven Funerals in Victoria as she was on her way to a funeral after just finishing another service.

She told me that amid all this uncertainty, funeral directors remain committed to providing the best possible service to grieving families.

The Prime Minister announced that only 10 people could attend a funeral, and that includes funeral directors, clergy and cemetery workers.

"We're doing everything to comply with the new rules, despite not being categorised by government as an essential service.

"I've got a funeral on Friday and there are 30 immediate family. We are doing our best to find a solution for those mourners. We've moved the location to ensure we can ensure a space that caters for four metres for person and we're seeking clarification about whether we can have the mourners in the cemetery in groups of 10, perhaps 15 minutes at the graveside per group.

"These people are bereft after losing someone and all this on top of that grief they're having to deal with this."

Carly says she's thankful that funerals can still go ahead here in Australia. In countries like Italy where there are an overwhelming number of Covid 19 deaths, the deceased are being buried with no funeral.

Funeral director Carly Dalton's new reality. Social distancing and new rules mean that Australian funerals are limited to 6 or 7 mourners adhering to a four metre per person rule. PHOTO: Greenhaven Funerals, Carly Dalton.

ABOUT THE BLOGGER: Lisa Herbert is a journalist, death literacy advocate and author of The Bottom Drawer Book: an after death action plan, an informative and amusing workbook and funeral planning guide for those who want to prepare for the inevitable. It is available in Australia for $24.95, including postage.

Lisa Herbert is a journalist and death literacy advocate.

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Prime Minister's latest Covid 19 advice sees funeral giant's share price plummet.

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The share price of Australia's largest funeral provider has plummeted after the Prime Minister publicly announced funeral attendance restrictions of just 10 people because of measures to minimise the transmission of Coronavirus. This figure includes the priest or celebrant, funeral directors and cemetery workers. In reality, we're talking about six or seven mourners.

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Reverend: It's a beautiful story in desperate times

The coronavirus pandemic and quarantine have changed the way many people worship. Rev. Peter Walsh describes performing last rites over the phone for a parishioner in quarantine.

Source: CNN

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reverend performs last rites over the phone for patient in quarantine - cnn video

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The coronavirus pandemic and quarantine have changed the way many people worship. Rev. Peter Walsh describes performing last rights over the phone for a parishioner in quarantine.

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"Washington state officials this week banned funerals and memorial services until the end of the month, with that moratorium likely to be extended indefinitely. Burials are now "delivery only," meaning that only mortuary workers are allowed at the grave site."

#funerals

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subscribe to Coronavirus Daily podcast

The novel coronavirus, which has hit the U.S. like a storm that no one saw coming, has taken a toll on schools, restaurants, bars, the airline industry, retail and other businesses.

Now, it's affecting the funeral home industry.

Washington state officials this week banned funerals and memorial services until the end of the month, with that moratorium likely to be extended indefinitely. Burials are now "delivery only," meaning that only mortuary workers are allowed at the grave site.

"It will affect a lot of people," says mortician Russ Weeks, who owns, along with his brother, eight funeral homes, four cemeteries and three crematories in the Seattle area.

Washington state has been the hardest hit in the U.S. so far: nearly 1,400 COVID-19 cases and 74 deaths. New York is second with 39 deaths, followed by California with 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The pandemic has resulted in unprecedented challenges for funeral homes.

John Wenig, a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association and owner of several funeral homes in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., says while those who deal with the dead have been trained to take universal precautions, COVID-19 is unique.

"The coronavirus is more mental than it is actual in terms of how we care for that body," he says. "We're simply more aware. It's a sobering thing for everyone."

In Wisconsin and many other states, officials have mandated how many people can gather in one space at a time. Last week it was 50; now it's 10, showing the unpredictability of the pandemic. That has forced Wenig and others to hold viewings and funeral services in shifts, ask mourners to stand six feet apart and implore priests and other clergy to be brief. Services that once spanned an hour or two are now over in mere minutes, Wenig says.

"We're encouraging brevity," he says. "It's not ideal, but it's the best we can offer to secure the safety and health of our community."

But for some communities that treat funerals as celebrations with singing, eulogizing and fellowshipping, a few minutes to say goodbye is less than ideal.

"We understand that grief needs closure," Wenig says. "Being deprived of that opportunity is a huge emotional blow."

The virus is also prompting funeral homes to rethink how they handle bodies. In Seattle, Weeks says his staff now "double bags" every body they pick up and puts surgical masks on the deceased to capture any air that might be expelled from the lungs. They also use face shields.

"It cuts down on the threat of infection," he says.

James Schwartz, general manager of the Cremation Society of Maryland and the MacNabb Funeral Home just outside of Baltimore, predicts a rise in cremations if the virus continues to spread and people are forced into isolation.

"I think we will see more people being cremated because they can't have the viewings, and the services and people want to mourn and continue forward with their lives," Schwartz says.

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Funeral Homes Change Their Practices In Response To Coronavirus

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subscribe to Coronavirus Daily podcast The novel coronavirus, which has hit the U.S. like a storm that no one saw coming, has taken a toll on schools, restaurants, bars, the airline industry, retail and other businesses. Now, it's affecting the funeral home industry.

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"The Federal Government has banned large indoor and outdoor gatherings to prevent the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), and this includes sorry business and family gatherings.

We know sorry business and other cultural reasons for large gatherings in communities are very important, but it is important to understand that it will put Elders and others who are already ill at serious risk if you don’t observe health advice."

#funerals #firstnations #IndigenousPeoples

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"Even family will not be able to attend funeral services under the country's level four lock-down, the Funeral Directors Association of New Zealand says."

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Even family will not be able to attend funeral services under the country's level four lock-down, the Funeral Directors Association of New Zealand says.

Gary Taylor, the association's president, said he got confirmation today from the Ministry of Health that nobody would be able to attend funeral services or burials.

"Prior to that they had told us there could be gatherings, but that's been reeled back now - there are no funeral services.

"That has a huge implication for families going forward. The very act of gathering together and providing support to each other is really important to a family's mental wellbeing, as they process what has happened to them.

"As much as we are absolutely behind the Government's restrictions and we understand what they are for, it does mean that families are going to suffer."

* Covid19.govt.nz: The Government's official Covid-19 advisory website

There are about 90 deaths every day in New Zealand. The restrictions will impact cultural and religious practices. For example, according to Islamic law a person should be buried as soon as possible from the time of death.

Taylor, who runs a funeral service in Northland, said some funerals would already be planned for the coming days and funeral directors would have to work their way through that with families.

READ MORE:
* Coronavirus Covid-19: The science of soap and washing our hands
* Covid 19 coronavirus: Top science adviser says there is mounting evidence NZ needs to go into 'extreme shutdown'
* Coronavirus drug in New Zealand: Scientists to trial medicine on Kiwi patients
* Coronavirus: Scientists in China report disappointing treatment results

There were options for grieving families, including holding a memorial service once the lockdown ends, hopefully in four weeks.

"Potentially with modern embalming the deceased could even be kept at our premises for that period of time, if that's what the family wanted. Or, cremated and buried and then the memorial service to take place once these restrictions are relaxed a bit."

Livestreaming services has become more common but wouldn't really be an option - only a celebrant or minister could attend in person, and as such watching from isolation at home wouldn't give much sense of togetherness.

The extraordinary Covid-19 restrictions could well mean that people die alone and are buried or cremated alone.

"The word sad doesn't adequately express the awful situation that would be, for that individual and those people that would have been part of acknowledging their life. That is so important to us as human beings, to be able to grieve correctly and properly ... we are going to have a lot of families in the future who have unresolved issues around the death of their loved one."

Under level four lockdown the transfer of bodies from hospitals, hospice or homes would still take place, and funeral service staff would wear personal protective equipment.

However, Taylor said that gear was running desperately low, and his association had asked the Ministry of Health to help secure new supplies. There was a low risk of transmission from a deceased person, but caution was still needed.

According to the Ministry of Health, any event with public congregation must close, including weddings and funerals/tangi. This will apply for the next four weeks from March 23.

Taylor said funeral services could cope with a "sizeable" increase in the number of deaths, if that were to happen because of the spread of Covid-19.

"But there would come a point where we would require some government intervention around storage, and government intervention around burials and cremations - relaxing some of the rules around the cremation process and have immediate access to burial plots in cemeteries at short notice."

He was stunned at the situation.

"It's like being in a sci-fi movie. This is the single biggest event that probably most of us will ever experience. We shouldn't be surprised at anything."

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Covid-19 coronavirus: Funeral services won't happen for at least four weeks

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Even family will not be able to attend funeral services under the country's level four lock-down, the Funeral Directors Association of New Zealand says. Gary Taylor, the association's president, said he got confirmation today from the Ministry of Health that nobody would be able to attend funeral services or burials.

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"Eternal Reefs has decided, at this point, to postpone our projects

through May 2020 but offer unattended placements at our Sarasota Silvertooth reef site"

https://www.eternalreefs.com

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#morgue #deathcare

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spain coronavirus: ice rink turned into a morgue amid outbreak - cnn

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Al Goodman, Laura Perez Maestro, Ingrid Formanek, Max Ramsey and Ivana Kottasová, CNN

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Spain turns ice rink into a morgue as coronavirus deaths pile up

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An ice rink in Madrid has been turned into a temporary morgue as Spain tries to cope with the fallout from its rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak.

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A personal reflection:
I attended my aunt's committal last weekend (21st March 2020). I say committal only, because we cannot have a funeral. One of her sons and their family are now in self-isolation for two weeks, having returned from travel to Sri Lanka. They didn't get to attend, so we live-streamed the committal. About half way through, one of the young children present decided to pull down their pants and run around the grave (haha!). A little bit of levity in an otherwise odd experience. Nobody hugged or kissed. I felt terrible when I ducked out of the way to decline a hug from my cousin.

The funeral directors were lovely, but they looked worried. They don't have enough PPE and enough space in cold storage. They told me of a little girl, but six years old, who they have sitting in their morgue, unable to be repatriated to New Zealand because there are no flights operating at the moment. It's not just the deaths and funerals from COVID-19 that are going to change in this next year. It's how we come together to mourn the dead.
- Hannah Gould (@hrhgould)

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#livestreaming #funerals #grief

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"We are guiding families to do small private services or graveside services at this point, and immediate family only," said co-owner Bob Shank Jr. from the main location in Perrysburg.

However, everything is flexible.

"We will meet the family's needs," Shank said.

He said he changed their policy on March 18. All funerals previously scheduled went on "but the number of attendees was limited."

With six locations throughout Northwest Ohio, each can accommodate differing numbers of people while still maintaining the six feet recommended for social distancing.

There are signs all around the facilities and staff encourage families to keep the 6-foot "social distancing" space.

They are being sensible, though, Shank said.

"We're never going to stop a family member from hugging another family member. There is a limit to what we're going to do," he said. "We're trying to be reasonable while following all of the guidelines."

When there is a graveside service, there can still be something inside for family, Shank said.

"We still allow a funeral service in the funeral home for immediate family," he said, adding that is limited to 10 people.

Witzler-Shank continues to offer live streaming from every branch.

"We live streamed our first funeral last Saturday," Shank said.

They have been live streaming for three to four years, "but I think now more families will want it."

The trend is also forcing those funeral homes that have maybe fallen behind to catch up, he said.

Shank has been a licensed funeral director for 27 years.

"My father, who has been in 65 years, has never seen anything like this," he said.

The effects of the mandates has impacted business in many ways, Shank said.

"Lack of gathering is the biggest effect. That is what is a funeral ... and that ability has been taken away."

Brittany Dunn, funeral director with Dunn Funeral Home in Bowling Green, said for a visitation planned for Thursday in Waterville, they are only allowing 10 people in at a time. The rest are being asked to wait outside or in their vehicle.

"The funeral service is going to be private," she said, but they are recording it for family and live streaming it on Facebook.

"It's a really hard and touchy time. For people who are grieving, it's just so hard," she said.

Dunn Funeral Home has been in business in Bowling Green since 1975 and she has been a funeral director since 2012.

Staff is cleaning the facilities, and there are hand sanitizer stations. People know if they are greeting a family, "keep your distance. No shaking hands or hugging."

They discuss the social distancing with families and leave it to them to guide family members. Rather than hug, family members may say "you being here is enough," Dunn said.

"It's so hard, we're taking it case by case," she added. "There's a lot of touching that is in our industry, comforting people."

People have been understanding and are willing to work with them to find a solution, Dunn said.

Ernie Marsteller of Marsh & Marsteller Funeral Homes, with three locations in the area, said they haven't had to cancel any services.

"You can't put grief on hold," he said, adding that many families are having visitation in their homes and still planning a service.

Marsteller said he just downloaded a live streaming guide for their two locations. He was speaking from their original location in Luckey.

"We can still have a funeral but people can watch virtually," Marsteller said.

"I've never seen anything like this that has a direct effect on everybody," he said, adding that he has been in the business for 30 years.

He said cemeteries may have graveside services, but also are limiting attendance to 10 people.

Marsteller said in the past month her has seen the number of cremations rise - with services planned for a later date.

Barndt Funeral Home in Wayne remains committed and prepared to safely care for the families it serves during the COVID-19 pandemic, said funeral director Dannielle Barndt.

They are limiting the number of people to immediate family only and webcasting the funeral service live.

"Comforting our families during difficult times is very important to us, and it will definitely be challenging during this social distancing, but we are still working really hard to be there for our families in every way possible," Barndt said.

The new site also has a blog titled Ask the Director, where they write educational articles on all topics including grief, COVID-19 and funeral services.

She has been a licensed funeral director since 2013. Her grandfather, Charles Barndt, bought the funeral home back in 1961, and then her father, Doug Barndt, bought the funeral home in 1994.

"In that time we have never seen anything like this," she said.

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By Debbie Rogers, Sentinel-Tribune Editor

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'You can't put grief on hold' - Funeral homes adjust to coronavirus regulations

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"We are guiding families to do small private services or graveside services at this point, and immediate family only," said co-owner Bob Shank Jr. from the main location in Perrysburg. However, everything is flexible. "We will meet the family's needs," Shank said. He said he changed their policy on March 18.

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Funeral directors say they are being forced to re-use "single-use" medical equipment, like body bags and plastic gowns, as the coronavirus emergency challenges how they deal with both the dead and the loved ones left behind.

#PPE #funerals #industry

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Posted March 20, 2020 14:17:28

Funeral directors say they are being forced to re-use "single-use" medical equipment, like body bags and plastic gowns, as the coronavirus emergency challenges how they deal with both the dead and the loved ones left behind.

As bans on large crowds and other emergency measures impact funerals, behind-the-scenes staff are facing challenges due to a shortage of protective gear.

National Funeral Directors Association of Australia president Nigel Davies said the industry was being forgotten during the COVID-19 pandemic because the Federal Government didn't recognise it as an essential healthcare service.

He said new health guidelines stipulated eye protection, mask, full-body gown, gloves and leak-free body bags to be used when moving a body suspected of having coronavirus.

But the guidelines failed to take into account the equipment was in short supply and reserved for hospital and nursing home staff, not funeral home staff who retrieve the deceased.

"We're already getting requests from places to be wearing PPE (personal protection equipment) that we can't get because, theoretically, nobody has bothered to notice we're essential-service workers as yet," Mr Davies said.

"The issue is our staff - that spend their entire time going and collecting deceased, some of whom may be infectious, we don't know - are walking into nursing homes that are in lockdown without necessarily having the adequate equipment (because we can't get it).

"We're already at the point of trying to re-use things that are theoretically disposable, but if they can be sterilised or re-used in any way, we're having to do so.

"Cheap plastic gowns are supposedly one-use disposable items but, if you can't replace them, you take them back and you spray them clean with the chemical and you hang them out for a day and you put them back in the vehicles.

He said there was also a shortage of leak-proof body bags for handling bodies confirmed or suspected to have died as a result of COVID-19 and the bags were "too valuable" to dispose of after a single use.

Mr Davies said he wanted the government to work out who was part of the essential services chain and for funeral directors to be covered under the essential care healthcare network, so they could access PPE.

"Funeral directors are trying to do the same things that any hospital or ambulance person would, but we have to have access to the equipment to do that," he said.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt's office was contacted for comment, but did not reply before publication.

Funerals hit by rules on crowds

It's not the only issue confronting the funeral industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr Davies, who also runs Lonergan & Raven Funerals in the Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill, said he'd changed venues for funeral services to allow for social distancing.

He's also live-streamed funerals to keep numbers below the government-mandated 100-people gatherings.

He says he holds one funeral service a day to allow time to clean the fabric-covered furniture and carpets, which he is considering removing to allow for more efficient cleaning and more services.

Some funerals are now invitation-only, with online condolence books to prevent people sharing a pen.

"Some of the families are obviously finding it quite difficult, but they're all being quite reasonable," he said.

Tobin Brothers Funerals director James MacLeod said his company had suspended catering and its limousine service for families.

"We're talking to families about 50 people attending (funerals), because we know it will escalate to 60 or 70," Mr MacLeod said.

Mourners going online

He said he was expecting a rise in funeral webcasting.

"We have the ability to record funeral services and we're offering to client families to upload them so they can be distributed and watched online (by) those that couldn't attend the funeral," Mr MacLeod said.

"Webcasting's been available for over a decade now ... and it's worked very successfully. We do it on multiple occasions each and every week.

"You think there would be an uptake (on live streaming funerals) given the new attendance numbers and a cap on 100 people at any event, including funerals."

Sunraysia Funerals owner Elvira Iamarino said the new rules for crowd numbers made already challenging times potentially more difficult and the bereaved would need to be understanding.

"If people are mindful of what is expected, it will be a lot better outcome for the mourning families and also for everybody else because these things are put in place for everyone's safety," Ms Iamarino said.

"People have to be aware that they may be asked to be outside the building if the service is going to be held inside a building.

"People (need) to be courteous, respectful and understanding, and not only just for funerals but generally in every day things we do, because at the end of the day we're all in the same boat."

Topics: health, death, community-and-society, doctors-and-medical-professionals, covid-19, diseases-and-disorders, ballarat-3350, warrnambool-3280, mildura-3500, sydney-2000, melbourne-3000

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Funeral staff 're-using body bags, gowns' due to COVID-19 restrictions

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Posted March 20, 2020 14:17:28 Funeral directors say they are being forced to re-use "single-use" medical equipment, like body bags and plastic gowns, as the coronavirus emergency challenges how they deal with both the dead and the loved ones left behind.