COVID-19 saturates South Korean hospitals and crematoria

SEOUL (AP) — South Korean health authorities have instructed crematoria to burn more bodies a day and funeral homes to add more refrigerators to store the dead, while families tried to organize funerals at the peak of COVID-19 deaths.

The country has suffered a large coronavirus outbreak driven by the contagious omicron variant, which has put into trouble a previously solid management of the pandemic and triggered deaths and hospitalizations.

The authorities had already allowed the country's 60 crematoria to incinerate for more hours a day last week, expanding their total capacity from about 1,000 to 1,400 incinerations per day.

But that has not been enough to reduce the accumulation of bodies waiting to be cremated in the populous metropolitan area of Seoul, where half of the country's 52 million inhabitants live and is the core of the outbreak. The backlog has also spread to funeral homes and hospitals and other facilities, while families encountered problems organizing funerals due to longer waits for cremations.

Authorities will instruct regional crematoria to increase operations from five to seven days a week, Ministry of Health official Son Youngrae said. That would be equivalent to the activity of crematoria in the capital area.

Crematoria will also be asked to receive reserves from outside their region, something that many do not routinely do, to reduce delays in the Seoul region, Son said.

The 1,136 funeral homes, hospital morgues and other precincts can now hold some 8,700 bodies, and the authorities will ask them to expand that number with more refrigerators or refrigerated rooms.

“There have been regional differences in COVID-19 deaths due to various factors such as the size of the elderly population in each community, and there is also a difference in the incineration capacity that each community can manage,” Son said.

The country reported 384 new deaths from COVID-19 on Tuesday, the sixth day in a row with more than 300, including a record 429 on Thursday. The number of patients with the virus in serious or critical condition was 1,104. Almost 70% of intensive care beds reserved for COVID-19 were occupied.

The omicron outbreak has been considerably larger than expected by the health authorities, who continue to express a cautious hope that it will be close to topping.

South Korea has a much lower rate of COVID-19 deaths relative to its population than the United States or many other European nations, something that authorities attribute to the high vaccination rate. But some experts believe that the country could be on the verge of a dangerous increase in hospitalizations.

Omicron has forced South Korea to rethink its strict COVID-19 response, based on laboratory testing, aggressive contact tracing and quarantines, to focus limited medical resources on priority groups, including people aged 60 and over and others with previous medical problems.