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Air quality regulators have lifted limits on the number of cremations that can be performed in Los Angeles County, citing a death rate more than double the pre-pandemic norm and an unmanageable backlog of corpses.
More than 2,700 bodies were in storage at local hospitals and the county coroner’s office on Friday, Jan.15, the South Coast Air Quality Management District said on Sunday, explaining its decision to issue an executive order suspending incineration limits.
This is the first time that the South Coast AQMD has lifted its limits on cremations, said Nahal Mogharabi, the agency’s communications director.
The 28 Los Angeles County crematoriums have the capacity to perform more cremations, but most of their permits include a monthly cap on cremations due to environmental regulations, the regulator said. Environmentalists have for years called for limits on cremations, studies of which have shown toxic mercury emissions from dental fillings to be released. Mogharabi said “the toxic effects of the air” resulting from the executive decree are expected to be “relatively small”.
The order came at the request of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office and the Department of Public Health, both of which confirmed the backlog in itself was a potential threat to public health, AQMD said. from the south coast. He also warned that the coroner predicted a “new wave” of deaths would begin four to six weeks after the New Year’s holidays.
A man who answered the phone at the Cremation Society of Los Angeles said no one was available to talk because they were too busy. “We are beyond our ability,” he said, refusing to give his name.
The body backlog is just the latest chilling detail to illustrate the severity of the coronavirus crisis in Los Angeles. As of Sunday, the county had suffered 13,848 total deaths from Covid-19, more than half of them in less than two months since Thanksgiving.
California became the first state to record more than 3 million cases of the virus on Monday, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Hospitals in the region are struggling to treat the sickest among the more than 13,000 new cases diagnosed every day. Health officials have ordered ambulances not to transport patients who are unlikely to survive; some hospitals are struggling to maintain their oxygen supplies.
The pressure on the “dead management system” is only one aspect of the crisis. The California National Guard has been called in to assist hospitals and mortuaries by storing the corpses in refrigerated trucks, the LA Times reported.
Meanwhile, hope for relief from the various coronavirus vaccines remains far off. California has so far administered the first doses of the vaccination to just 2.2% of its population, one of the lowest rates in the country. Only Idaho, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama are lagging behind, according to an analysis of CDC data by the New York Times.
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