The coronavirus planning

The impact on cremation and burial services

I am sure that very few people in the UK gave very much thought to the early reports in January of this year concerning an unpleasant Flu type virus that was having a big impact in a city in China that most people have never heard of, Wuhan.

Wuhan, the sprawling capital of central China’s Hubei province with a population of 11 million people, is a commercial centre divided by the Yangtze and Han Rivers. The City contains many lakes and parks, including expansive, picturesque East Lake. Nearby, the Hubei Provincial Museum displays relics from the Warring States period, including the Marquis Yi of Zeng’s coffin.

Even as the reports that the city of Wuhan and Hubei Province were put in “lock down” began to fill the news bulletins, there was an air of all this is so far away. Only when we began to hear the term “self- isolating” regularly and saw pictures of busloads of people being put into quarantine having travelled from Wuhan to the UK, did we really begin to take notice. Then there was the strident message about washing our hands carefully and regularly- could something really be happening here?

Following this, the speed at which we seemed to find ourselves really threatened with Coronavirus came as a real shock to huge numbers of the UK population. Of course as we now know the decisions by the Government to effectively “lock- down” the UK with shops, cafes, restaurants, pubs and bars and then schools and colleges all closed and people being told to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, became reality.

The bereavement services industry along with funeral directors, coffin manufacturers and so on have always been taken rather for granted by the public. Not very visible except for when a bereavement affects individual families (even though we know that there are around 11000 deaths a week in the UK) and in some Local Authorities the crematorium and cemeteries have been low down the pecking order for investment and new facilities.

The Local Authorities have however always been responsible or Local Resilience Planning and Local Resilience Forums (LRF) have over the years in different parts of the country had a role to play in disaster planning which may affect their local area like a jumbo jet crashing on a housing estate for example, and this type of planning has necessarily involved the Local Authority, Police, Fire Service and the NHS. For many years I took part in regular “exercises” that were designed to test how things would work under certain disaster conditions.

A pandemic plan was always part of the LRFs responsibility, and all crematoria and cemeteries will, I am sure, have one even if it is a bit dusty. It has been so many years since there has been a major outbreak of disease, the most recent flu pandemic the world has seen was the 2009 swine flu pandemic which lasted from early 2009 to late 2010 and was believed to have infected around 700 million to 1.4 billion people - around 11 to 21 per cent of the world's population but the UK was only mildly affected. The number of fatalities from the illness, which originated in Mexico, is believed to be between 150,000 and 575,000, meaning the virus had a relatively low mortality rate.

There have been years when there have been higher than average deaths from flu but nothing that in the UK has required planning on the scale that we now see to cope with the predicted number of people who may die as a result of the Coronavirus.

We all hope very much that the initial predicted number of deaths is not realised and that more modest numbers of deaths will result. However, against the background of a “lock-down” for all but key workers, an NHS that is stretched and as of today (8th April) coping with a very much higher than normal number of ICU admissions, we see large Nightingale Field Hospitals being constructed at the Excel in London and in Birmingham and Glasgow and other cities. In addition to these hospitals we also see that the Government have commissioned considerable additional mortuary provision.

I am very pleased that the professional organisations representing the bereavement services and funeral sectors are working closely together and have formed the Death Management Advisory Group (DMAG) so that a co-ordinated response can be made to Government in answer to how this pandemic will be managed and also to advise the Government on what measures need to be taken.

The organisations that are working closely together in DMAG are National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD), Society of Allied Independent Funeral Directors (SAIF), Association of Private Crematoria and Cemeteries (APCC), Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management (ICCM), Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities (FBCA), Funeral Furnishing Manufacturers’ Association (FFMA) and The Cremation Society.

We have already seen differences of opinion between cremation authorities regarding how many mourners should be able to attend a funeral service with numbers ranging post lock down from 25 to 5 and quite a number of crematoria have stopped offering a service for grieving families and are accepting direct cremations only.

There are already additional pressures on some crematoria and considerable pressure in some parts of London for burials and the LRFs are beginning to put plans in place in case the numbers of deaths increase significantly. The Government, and we, I am sure, are hopeful that the social distancing measures introduced will have helped to flatten the curve so that crematoria and cemeteries across the UK can cope.

As I write the total number of deaths attributed to Covid-19 has exceeded 10,000 which is indeed a very high number but at the time of writing the figures showing excess deaths has not yet been made available which will in time put the numbers of deaths into a better perspective.