(Jewish Group) In LA and Arizona, COVID death surge overwhelms the Jewish community
In Los Angeles, the Jewish funeral homes cannot keep up with the bodies.
Some family members are being forced to wait a week or even longer for burials. The city’s largest Jewish funeral home, Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries, rented a second 12-meter refrigerated truck last week to hold bodies with the one rented in March filled to capacity with 40 corpses.
In some cases, funerals are being delayed because overwhelmed doctors too busy caring for patients at inundated hospitals don’t have time to fill out death certificates and burial permits.
The culprit is the unprecedented COVID-19 surge in California, which this week became the first U.S. state to report more than 3 million coronavirus cases since the outbreak of the pandemic. One million of those cases have occurred in Los Angeles County, home to America’s second-largest Jewish community with about 500,000 souls. More than 14,000 people have died in Los Angeles and hospital intensive care units are filled to capacity.
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