Crematoriums struggling to cope with COVID toll

A long and anguished wait is tormenting not only COVID-19 patients in need of a hospital bed but also families seeking to bring departed loved ones to their final resting place.

Bereaved families in Biñan City, Laguna, have had to wait for at least two days to secure a slot in the lone crematorium, while in Cebu City, private crematoriums are fully booked and will remain so for the next two weeks.

Cebu City Councilor David Tumulak said the queues for cremation were getting longer with the rising number of deaths due to the coronavirus.

Merlinda Banagua, who oversees Biñan’s COVID-19 burial program with a private and local government partner, the New Life Crematorium, said there were two instances—on Aug. 18 and Aug. 20—when space ran out in the morgue freezer.

Three bodies in the public hospital could not be collected for two or three days and thus began to decompose. “This has never happened before,” she said.

Banagua, 43, aid that on the average, five to six corpses, all positive for the coronavirus, were bring cremated every day since early August.

The crematorium has only one machine in operation, she said, adding that the closest funeral home with a mortuary refrigerator that could store 12 corpses at a time also serviced other cities in Laguna.

Banagua said morgues were charging P3,500-P5,000 a day for storage.

‘Just too many’

“During the March-April surge, we probably just had two [corpses] in a week. I guess there’s just too many COVID deaths this time,” Banagua said.

As a result, she said, families had to wait for at least two days when the actual process—from furnace to urn—was supposed to take only five hours at most.

“Fortunately, the crematorium staff and I haven’t caught the virus,” Banagua said.

She said it was the “mental stress” that was difficult to cope with. “Imagine having to face and explain [the situation] to the bereaved families,” she said.

According to Banagua, the city government of Biñan has purchased a refrigerated container van that can store 200 corpses at a time, and is only waiting for the power line to be installed.

‘Not yet overwhelming’

At Manila North Cemetery, which is run by the city government, an average of 8-12 cadavers are being cremated daily starting in the second week of August, said its director Yayay Castañeda.

“That’s a lot, but I’d say not yet overwhelming,” she said.

During the earlier surge, Castañeda said, as many as 20-25 corpses were being cremated in a day, so that operations lasted until dawn.

She said there were a number of private crematoriums in Metro Manila, but the one at Manila North Cemetery served only city residents free of charge.

Only one machine is working, the other having conked out some time ago, Castañeda said.
“To give you an idea, [crematory] suppliers said a machine should only be [handling] five-six cadavers a day,” she said.

Very high demand

In Cebu City, an official of a funeral parlor who spoke on condition of anonymity said the demand for cremation had risen by about 80 percent since July.

The official said service requests had been received from as far as Oslob town in southern Cebu and around Metro Cebu but these had to be turned down because of full booking.

Councilor Joel Garganera, deputy chief implementer of Cebu City’s Emergency Operations Center, said the number of COVID deaths was more than five times the number recorded in June, with only 14 fatalities.

In July, the city recorded 86 COVID deaths; from Aug. 1 to Aug. 23, it tallied 192 deaths.

The city government is said to be planning the construction of mortuaries and two crematoriums to address the lack of burial spaces and facilities.

Abandoned building

Last week, a number of corpses stored in food freezers or piled on the floor were discovered by authorities in what appeared to be an abandoned building in Barangay Basak-San Nicolas in Cebu City.

Councilor Tumulak said he believed that the building was being used by certain funeral parlors as a storage facility for bodies awaiting cremation.