In mid-August, a cold storage facility in a mortuary at a funeral home in Tokyo area was filled with nine bodies, the maximum capacity.

All the boards with the names of the deceased had the word “COVID,” as they were confirmed to have been infected with the novel coronavirus.

The mortuary, where bodies were kept before they are sent to the crematorium, was no longer able to house them since August.

Bodies approaching the cremation date were stored in a separate room of the funeral home with 10 kilograms of dry ice in their coffins.

Even so, there were more bodies that could not be accommodated. The funeral home was forced to leave those bodies in other funeral homes’ refrigerated storage facilities. 

In a month from the end of July, the funeral home received more than 100 bodies, mostly elderly people.

“I have no idea when (the pandemic) will end. COVID is a disaster,” a manager at the mortuary said. 

Funeral homes in Japan are being overwhelmed with bodies that await cremation as the COVID-19 death toll continues to rise amid the ongoing seventh wave.

The number of related deaths exceeded 7,000 in August, the highest monthly figure on record.

Bodies that could not be accommodated in refrigerated storage facilities are pouring into mortuaries. The demand comes as many crematoriums are limiting their acceptance of infected bodies, citing the infection risk, although the risk from dead bodies is considered low.

In the Tokyo metropolitan area, many bodies have been waiting more than a week to be cremated.

REALITY OF DEATHS AMONG 7TH WAVE

At the overwhelmed mortuary at the Tokyo funeral home, an employee picked up the phone at 10 a.m. on a recent day.

“We received a call that one person died at a hospital and one at an elderly care facility. We are going to pick them up,” the employee said.

Around noon, two staffers wearing protective medical gowns removed a body wrapped in a transparent body bag from a coffin, which was taken out of cold storage.

They applied light makeup to the deceased’s face. It was part of the preparation to show the face to the bereaved family as they bid their final goodbyes.

The funeral home could finally send the body to a crematorium on the eighth day after receiving it.

But half an hour later, two more bodies were brought in, which the funeral home had received requests for in the morning.

Staff were also scurrying to another hospital to pick up another body.

At 6:30 p.m., the body of a woman in her 80s who died at a nursing home was placed in cold storage.

By 8:30 p.m., the funeral home accepted five bodies from hospitals and elderly care facilities. Including those accepted up to the day, a total of 26 bodies were being kept in the cold storage facility or stored with dry ice in a separate room.

“This is the reality,” a young staffer said.

LIMITED NUMBER WILLING TO ACCEPT COVID-RELATED BODIES

The health ministry released guidelines in July 2020 stating that the risk of infection from dead bodies is low.

On Aug. 23 of this year, the ministry once again asked local governments to inform the funeral industry that novel coronavirus-infected bodies should be cremated in the same manner as noninfected bodies.

Even now, however, there are a limited number of crematoriums that accept the bodies of those who died from COVID-19. Of these, many have quotas for the number of bodies that they will accept.

Some crematoriums cited the risk of infection among the bereaved family members and staff as the reason.

Some local government officials said, “separate cremation services can maintain privacy for the bereaved family” and “there is a high psychological hurdle in having usual cremation and COVID cremation be conducted in the same place.”

According to a health ministry tally, Japan’s COVID-19-related deaths in August was 7,295, 5.6 times the number in July. It far surpassed the previous monthly high of 4,897 recorded in February.

The surge in the death toll resulted in exceeding the quotas for the COVID-19-related deceased at crematoriums. There were a number of cases where bodies were kept in mortuaries for more than a week for cremation in various areas.

Tokyo’s 23 wards have nine crematoriums, but only two public and three private crematoriums are accepting cremations for those who died of COVID-19.

Due to the rapid increase in the death toll, the total quota for infected bodies was doubled compared to July, to around 30 per day.

Even so, at the peak, the public crematoriums were fully booked up to a week in advance, while one private crematorium was fully reserved up to 10 days in advance.

Sagamihara in Kanagawa Prefecture, which had a one-week wait for cremation, decided to eliminate the quota starting in September.

Yokohama expanded the quota to a maximum of 22, more than seven times the number in early August.

In southern Okinawa Prefecture, two public crematoriums were accepting infected bodies. One with a daily quota of four had an up to two-week wait for cremation, so nine bodies were cremated in a day as a special exception.

Nagoya which had a five-day wait for reservations, increased the quota to 12 in August, four times the number in July.

In Osaka, a city-run crematorium raised the quota to around a dozen.

(This article was written by Tetsuro Takehana and Kazuhiro Nagashima.)