Funeral homes still struggle to meet demand from pandemic

EL PASO, Texas -- Despite Covid-19 cases declining and the number of people getting vaccinated increasing, there’s still a long way to go. One area that has been struggling to keep up throughout the pandemic are funeral homes.

"This past year has been very hard on all of us, especially in the funeral industry,” Christopher Lujan, location manager at Sunset Funeral Homes said. “Seeing this many deaths in our community has affected all of us and hit home."

As of March 25, 2,356 people in El Paso have died to Covid-19. Due to this influx, the county maintained the storage of bodies and many funeral homes became backlogged.

Sunset Funeral Homes has had an increase of about 80 to 100 cases in 2020 compared to 2019, at each of their four locations.

Lujan said when they saw what was happening in New York at the beginning of the pandemic they made an effort to ensure the same didn’t happen at their funeral homes. To meet the demand they added three large refrigerator units and their own crematory.

Still, at the peak of COVID-19 they had around a three week wait.

The El Paso County Judge told ABC-7 at the county's facility, it had processed more than 1,000 people.

Due to a multitude of reasons, Samaniego said he heard of some families who didn't see their loved ones for up to 5 months.

"It had to do with not getting the medical examiners the information that he needed to process them,” County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said. “We did a lot for the doctors, they were really delaying and not giving us the death certificates and the other one is some of the families had Covid."

On top of this he said there has been another critical issue.

"Some of the funeral homes were taking when they were saturated while others were extremely ethical about it and they were only taking what they could handle,” Samaniego said.

The Judge said this is something they’ve been talking with funeral homes about to make sure there’s a better balance in the future.

The county is in the middle of formulating its exit strategy. In the next two weeks they will figure out how to get the bodies out of their facility and into funeral homes in a way that doesn’t push the problem onto them.

“The mayor and I spoke about this and it’s a huge priority,” Samaniego said.