What We Have Learned about Treating the Covid Case By Rory McKeown COVID-19 has been the talk of the funeral service profession more than anything else for over a year now. We’ve discussed the strain on our staff trying to accommodate families requesting viewing, scheduling walk-through funerals, drive-through funerals, and trying to meet the needs of large families when your state limits the number of people allowed in the chapel. I saw different funeral homes respond as best they could. Restrictions have begun to ease up a bit. More families are now able to fulfill their personal needs in regard to viewing times, the number of people present, and the types of services.
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n top of the logistical stress of arranging services, staff members were becoming sick and funeral homes were shorthanded. Meeting with CO VID family members that may have been contagious, or from contact in the prep room, firms were sending some people home sick for a twoweek quarantine. At the same time that funeral homes were being affected and shorthanded, the number of cases was increasing dramatically, especially in the major metropolitan areas across the country. Talking with embalmers the conversation often runs to how we’ve been through similar 44 | FuneralTimes
times as far as embalming, like when we first saw AIDS cases in the eighties. In some places there is so much concern for the safety of the staff that funeral directors are making the decision not to embalm CO VID confirmed cases at all. Additionally, there is the unknown factor of how long does the virus remain viable or contagious postmortem. One report states that Coronavirus has been found 27 days postmortem in the lungs. (Newsweek, 11/2/20). Based upon that, it doesn’t appear at this point that refrigeration has as much an effect on the viability of the virus as time. While after about 72 hours it has been found that the virus can no
