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A couple of weeks back, Arizona made national headlines for using off-site trailers to store bodies amid its surge in COVID-19 cases. I decided to take another look at why and found two important facts that had gone unreported. (Thread) 1/7
I reached out to the @azfcca to see what their members were experiencing because hospitals and funeral homes would have been the other chokepoints, right? Their responses were illuminating. In one case, a former employee of the @maricopacounty Medical Examiner's office... 2/7
explained that, at 150 bodies, their office's capacity was the smallest of the nation's top ten most populous counties. They've been using the same facility since 2002. Maricopa County's population has exploded since then. 3/7 https://www.thecentersquare.com/arizona/maricopa-morgue-needed-trailers-because-it-s-capacity-is-much-smaller-than-similar-counties/article_aa817ff2-e260-11ea-893f-bb20d1a437b9.html
He and another funeral home owner also gave another reason for the backlog, doctors weren't signing death certificates for weeks. This means the bodies can't be buried, cremated, etc. State law gives the attending physician 72 hours but there's no enforcement. 4/7
The other said he's had to "camp out" in a doctor's office an average of once a week to get them to sign off the cert. That's only after they go at least 1-2 weeks without signing. On a large scale, this could create a backlog of bodies in the process. 5/7 https://www.thecentersquare.com/arizona/arizona-doctors-not-signing-death-certificates-for-weeks-bodies-left-in-morgues/article_2e641416-e72e-11ea-87ff-bb600bf4a68b.html
Hospital systems have not responded to repeated requests about why the delays exist. One FH director said the real victims are the families who are forced to wait weeks before they can get closure on a loss of a loved one. 6/7
While I agreed, I feel like these details give some critical context to a narrative that bodies were piling up in Arizona's morgues due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Facts, not fear, right? 7/7
