As we celebrate the fifth anniversary of The World Health Organization announcing the novel Coronavirus A pandemic is the third column of A Six -parts MSNBC daily series This affects the lost million American life, political polarization, and decreasing confidence in public health measures that followed the spread of the virus and appreciate the country’s readiness for the next pandemic.
Although the Covid pandemic was not officially announced until March 11, 2020. In mid -February, one of our funeral directors in the professional funeral services in New Orleans had symptoms of a cold that were so severe that she was forced to seek care in a local emergency room. They told her that there was a respiratory infection of unknown origin. We believed that she had a cow and that she became ill, she was a precursor to one of the most emotionally experienced moments that I had experienced in my 38 years as Mortius.
In addition to the mysterious disease of this funeral director, there was another sign that something strange was happening, something abnormal: the phone continued to ring.
Understand, our funeral home usually served 35-40 families a month, but in February 2020 this number increased to 51, which is about 30%. At that time, we just put it as an unusually busy month. We had no idea how much it would be.
And almost all the numbers of February came before New Orleans – who hosted Mardi Grass on February 25, that year – he knew that Covid was also present before the city made the titles such as the place, which for at least some time had the highest Covid mortality in the United States.
In March 2020, we served 74 grieving families, about twice as much as a normal month. This April we served double the number of families we saw in March. Then we reached a record that still means our funeral home: 153 families.
It was absolutely impossible, operative and emotional. Our staff worked from 18 to 20 hours for weeks. And even when the initial jump dropped, to the last part of 2023, we are still 60 to 70 cases per month.
How bad was April 2020? This is the month that our funeral home prepared five couples for a funeral. Then there were three sisters. A sister one week died. Sister two next week. Sister three weeks after that. Hospitals constantly call us: “Can you come to take the body? Because we have nowhere to put them in the cooler. “
My funeral home has two places: one in New Orleans and one in Port Allen, Louisiana, which is on the other side of the river from Baton Rouge, and we had to use every inch space we had in both places to store the extra bodies, rooms that we usually wouldn’t use. We used changing rooms. We used corridors. We used the chapel. We removed the casket from the shelves and straightened them at their edges so that we could use these shelves to make room for the bodies that were assigned to us.
While political experts discussed the weight of the situation, we were on the front lines, witnessing first -hand the devastation made by the virus. The families were torn apart and we were confronted with the double challenge of navigating and working around the restrictions imposed by urban and civil servants to limit public gatherings to ensure public safety.
And on top of that, the families told us that the bodies we presented to them did not look like their loved ones. And they were right. We emballed them the way we always had, but we didn’t get the same results. Something about what Covid has done to their bodies is leaving their bodies swollen by fluid and their features are distorted. And we had to try to develop our techniques in order to deal with it.
Understand, my mandate as a Morcick in New Orleans involves time periods when the city was named as the capital of the country’s murder and included the devastation that followed the Hurricane Katrina and collapsed. But nothing I saw, then prepared me or the rest of our staff for what we saw in 2020. This is something I have never seen in my life and something I hope never to see again.
The pandemic was not just numerical; It was deeply human. We have witnessed the grief and the despair of families who lose loved ones, often without the chance to say goodbye. Meeting restrictions meant that traditional funerals have been replaced by smaller, more intimate services, often transmitted online to allow friends and family to participate from a distance. People failed to embrace their family members when they needed the most hugs. They failed to send them with a group of second line, as is the tradition in New Orleans.
I do not need to wonder what the families who have sought our services are going through – what it is like not to sit with your loved ones in the hospital and then I cannot have a suitable funeral for them – because in the summer of 2020 I lost my grandmother in Kovid. She was 90 years old. She had worked tirelessly in her church at the age of 15, but when she died, we could not even remember her there, as we felt she was worth it.
He only complicated the grief.
This article was originally published on msnbc.com