Oddly, if not for the policies mandated by government in that state, the overall rate of infections and deaths in the USA overall would be in decline at present. But no...that's not how they do things there; they've decided to do their own thing, regardless of the effect on their remaining citizens.
LOS ANGELES—On Saturday, a 53-foot refrigerated trailer was delivered to Continental Funeral Homes on East Beverly Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Alongside it sits a 20-foot trailer that Magda Maldonado began renting in the summer, but that no longer provides the room the 58-year-old funeral director needs for the volume of dead arriving from one day to the next.
Maldonado’s experience, and those of the people she works with, paint a picture of a death industry that is overloaded and overwhelmed. Of bodies piling up in area crematoriums, casket makers facing a shortage of supplies, and gravediggers struggling to keep up with equipment breakdowns.
“Wood is getting scarce, especially pine, which is the most inexpensive,” said Auriel ‘Guero’ Suarez, owner of the Universal Caskets Manufacturing Corporation in East Los Angeles. “In 52 years in the business, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
LA has seen exponential growth in new COVID infections and hospitalizations since the end of October, with nearly 100,000 new cases in the last week alone, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Back at Maldonado's funeral home, the excess corpses are loaded into the two refrigerated trailers because there's no place else to put them.
Unfortunately, East L.A. is largely Latino - and they believe in actual caskets and digging holes in the ground to inter them. Placing the body into a cardboard box, followed by cremation, is simply unacceptable to them. And so the backups continue, with more draconian restrictions already coming down the government pipeline.
