Morgues Are Overflowing in Mississippi and Coroners Are Terrified

https://news.yahoo.com/morgues-overflowing-mississippi-coroners-terrified-090318400.html

Larrison Campbell
,The Daily Beast•August 2, 2020

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in Mississippi, the bodies are piling up fast.

“My morgue was completely full all last week,” Panola County Coroner Gracie Gulledge told The Daily Beast. “It’s bad. We’ve only had our cooler full once or twice in the whole time I’ve been in operation, and it’s been 14 years.”

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Last week, 200 Mississippians died from coronavirus, the second highest rate per capita in the country behind Arizona, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. But infectious disease experts say that the lack of standardization and resources among coroners, combined with Mississippi’s longstanding health disparities, means the death rate there is likely even higher. Although undercounting is a problem nationally, in a state like Mississippi, where resources are scarce and state leaders have been hesitant to impose mask regulations or scale back reopening, it could be a full-blown crisis.

“If the coroners don’t have the resources to pursue the diagnosis or the potential diagnosis of COVID-19 in many of these unattended deaths, then that will undoubtedly lead to an undercount of the actual fatal impact of this pandemic virus,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious disease at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

And an accurate picture, he said, is essential for an accurate response.

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Under normal circumstances, a delay this severe would cause, in the words of Gulledge, “a bottleneck of bodies.” But with coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all surging in the state, it’s nothing short of a disaster. Bolivar County, where Rudy Seals is the coroner, has begun storing bodies in Panola County’s refrigeration unit. Gulledge said she’s hoping Panola County’s board of supervisors will approve another unit like that one; she said that Hinds County, home to Jackson, the state capital and biggest city, has ordered a unit, and Vicksburg has one on order, too.

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In Washington County, coroner Methel Johnson said she’d normally have around 30 calls in a month. But on Wednesday night alone, her office responded to six different deaths. In Panola County, Gulledge estimated she was getting almost double the calls she normally would. And, she pointed out, these calls don’t even represent everyone in the county who is dying. Coroners only respond to deaths when they happen outside a hospital. Within their walls, doctors are the ones who sign off on death certificates.

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To run for county coroner, Mississippi only requires residents have a high school diploma. Equally important and significantly more rare, however, is that they are comfortable with death. As a result, the day jobs of many Mississippi coroners tread in similar territory. Gulledge is a paramedic. Meredith runs a funeral home.

But 10 days into his own battle with coronavirus, Meredith admitted that after seeing it take others' lives dozens of times, he was now afraid for his own.

“I used to say I wasn't scared of the coronavirus, but I respected it,” he said, in between jagged breaths. “Well, now I'm scared of it and I respect it.”