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The phone rang over the gurgling embalming liquid as Geoff Burke eyed wearily at the corpse of the woman on the stretcher. Another victim of the coronavirus, she should wait. Over the phone, a nurse broke the news: a body pickup was needed.
Walking past the cremation oven, still hot from morning use, Burke went from his plastic embalming apron to a tie and collared shirt as Sunday football commentators joked on TV. As he prepared the hearse outside, his phone rang again. Second body pickup needed from nursing home outside Lewistown. Coronavirus again.
“It’s just scary,” Burke said. “I don’t know if this stuff is different where it touches the place, but we’re only doing the worst.”
The incessant phone calls, the long hours, the back-to-back funeral ceremonies, the deaths, the virus, the grief have now been part of Burke’s daily rhythm at the Heller-Hoenstine funeral home here in the county seat of rural Mifflin since early November. , when things started to deteriorate.
In April, as the coronavirus gripped parts of southeastern Pennsylvania, western and central counties like Mifflin remained largely unchanged. But in the first weeks of December, it was the tiny county of central Pennsylvania – with nearly three dozen COVID-19 deaths this month – that saw the highest per capita coronavirus death rate. high of the Commonwealth.
As the first wave of coronavirus cases ravaged urban centers like Philadelphia and New York City in the spring, rural hospitals in Pennsylvania planned and waited. But many residents have bristled with the COVID-19 restrictions, yet to see the devastation firsthand. Wearing masks was often seen as political, with mitigation efforts frivolous in cities largely unaffected by the virus.
But now it has happened.
Led by Mifflin, coronavirus death rates this month are on the rise in most counties in Pennsylvania. Blair County, where no deaths were reported in the outbreak in early April, saw 52 in the first two weeks of December. Westmoreland’s total increased six-fold from 15 to 93.
Since inheriting his family’s funeral home business in the small industrial borough of Lewistown, central Pennsylvania more than a decade ago, Burke, 45, has been no stranger to death before noon. But these days, as the coronavirus wreaks havoc in his rural hometown north of the Juniata River, things are different.
“It came out of nowhere,” said Burke, whose three funeral homes treat about 25 deaths in a typical November, but last month saw 61. In the first weeks of December, he saw 40. And this account.
“Three months ago,” he said, “I wasn’t really concerned with what’s going on right now. Our suppliers told us to prepare. And you know, we prepared that way, but mentally we had no idea it was going to happen.
These days, Burke says, he and his brother-in-law spend half an hour rearranging the bodies in the back freezer room to make room for more. The coroner keeps calling, offering a refrigerated truck to contain the corpses.
“I pray to God that we don’t have to bring one,” he said.
Seventy miles west of Lewistown, Conemaugh Nason Medical Center sits among church spiers and red barns in Roaring Spring, Blair County, a 45-bed rural hospital accustomed to the regular rhythms of flu and broken bones. The hospital, about 55 miles south of State College, even leases part of its land from local farmers.
“The soybeans are planted north of the hospital,” said Timothy Harclerode, CEO of the hospital. “It’s corn in the south.”
In the first two weeks of April, the county reported no deaths from COVID-19, but it didn’t last. In the first two weeks of December, 52 people died there.
The hospital averaged about 14 overnight-per-day, pre-coronavirus patients in 2019. In the past two months, the average has risen to 30.
According to state data, the first confirmed death in Blair County occurred on May 12. As of that date, Philadelphia had already suffered more than 1,250 deaths.
Yet hospitals across the state have braced themselves for the rush, canceling elective surgeries, getting as much PPE as possible, and turning to telehealth appointments instead of hospital visits.
But as the pandemic raged elsewhere, some questioned virus mitigation measures, wearing chalk masks and closing restaurants and gyms to politics ahead of the 2020 election. .
“There are people who don’t know anyone who has the virus here and they think the media blew it up disproportionately,” said Bryan Sipes, who runs a roadside barbecue in Conemaugh Nason Street. , where medical staff are preparing for Christmas in the COVID-19 neighborhood. “There are people who have it and have recovered and 85-year-olds who have lung problems and have died from it.
Sipes said his road business resumed during the pandemic, but did not make up for the money he lost.
“Most of my business was catering. It has all been canceled, ”he said.
Sipes said he was not wearing a mask.
“I just can’t,” he says.
Dawn Greene, a dental assistant who lives in Hollidaysburg, said she had never left the house without a mask since March. She still contracted COVID-19, heading to the emergency room on Thanksgiving Day. She said she still faces the ramifications of the virus.
Greene, who voted for President Donald Trump, said she was frustrated at how much divisional and symbolic masks have become in her area.
“Everybody thinks it’s their freedom taken away from them and things like that,” said Greene, 43. “But believe me, if you were as sick as I am, you would wear a mask. You would get it. I am very upset when I hear people minimize this. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Of the 150 deaths in Blair, 114 occurred in November and December.
In Westmoreland County – which saw 15 deaths in early April, up from 93 in the first weeks of December – attitudes toward the virus are also mixed, as some officials denounce the governor’s temporary restrictions Tom Wolf limiting indoor meals and gatherings. Yet Scottdale Funeral Home owner Frank Kapr said he saw the outlook on the virus change after people or their families were personally affected.
“There were those who said, ‘You know it’s political, after the election it’s going to go away,’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t think so … you’re wrong in that, this COVID -19 is real, ”said Kapr, president of the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association and director of his family’s funeral home for 40 years.
Although he saw the virus take hold in Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and New Jersey in the spring, “I never even imagined we would be bombed.”
“The only thing I can tell people now is to use your mask wherever you go and stay safe,” he said.
It was the wearing of masks and other mitigation efforts employed in Philadelphia – such as limiting dining and gatherings indoors – that Dr. Debra Bogen, director of the Allegheny County Department of Health, has said. encouraged residents to emulate last week at a press conference. Allegheny County, currently a hotbed of Commonwealth cases, recorded 46 deaths in the first weeks of April and 217 in the first weeks of December – an increase mainly attributed to the spread of the community, said Bogen. Philadelphia recorded 173 deaths in the first weeks of December, up from 354 in early April.
Like many public health officials in the state, Bogen urged the county to stand firm in mitigating the spread as they waited their turn for a vaccine, calling it “the light at the end of the tunnel that we were all looking for and hoping. these last months.
At Conemaugh Nason, employees were getting their first doses of the vaccine on Friday, and Harclerode said many were worried about the upcoming holidays and how it would affect patients. Sometimes when COVID-positive patients had similar delays and symptoms, the hospital would put two in one room.
“We tried to give them someone to talk to,” he says.
Harclerode said he believed there was “COVID fatigue” in rural areas, that eventually residents simply started to gather again. The hospital has seen spikes after July 4, Labor Day and Thanksgiving and is planning one after Christmas.
“There are usually very few patients and staff here at Christmas,” he said. “It won’t be this year.”
Nine months after the start of the pandemic and state-imposed restrictions on coronaviruses, no matter how many times Kapr has to tell grieving families that only 10 people can attend an indoor funeral ceremony, the pain is always fresh.
“I know most of my families and I know them very well,” he said. “And it’s hard for me to sit across the desk and tell them that’s what we need to do. They say, what about our grandchildren? It’s hard.”
The work is hard and emotionally trying, said Burke, the director of Mifflin’s funeral home. And this is the most difficult when he has to cremate or embalm a friend or acquaintance in his hometown, where everyone knows everyone. But he’s only taken two days off in the past two months, despite a recent foot of snow, despite the stress, arriving at his office before sunrise. He said he won’t give up now, that he owes the people of the borough to give them the mailings they deserve.
“We’re just trying to do what’s right, you know,” he said. “We are working hard to sleep well at night.”
By OONA GOODIN-SMITH, JASON NARK, DYLAN PURCELL and TIM TAI, The Philadelphia Inquirer
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