The phone rang over the gurgling of balm liquid as Geoff Burke looked at the woman’s body tiredly at the gurney. Another victim of the coronavirus, she will have to wait. Over the phone, a nurse told the news: the body needs to be charged.
Burke passed the crematorium oven, still hot from the morning, and Burke changed from his plastic balm skirt to a tie and a collared shirt when the football commentators chatted on television on Sunday. As he prepared the hearse outside, his phone rang again. Second pickup needed at a nursing home outside Lewistown. Weather Coronavirus.
“It’s just scary,” Burke says. “I do not know if these things are different where it hits places, but we are only getting the worst.”
The incessant phone calls, the long hours, the rugby ceremonies, the deaths, the virus, the grief have since become part of Burke’s daily rhythm at the Heller-Hoenstine Funeral Home here in Mifflin County. in early November, when things first started to get bad.
While the coronavirus infected parts of southeastern Pennsylvania in April, western and central provinces like Mifflin remained largely untouched. But within the first few weeks of December, it was the small central province of Pennsylvania – with nearly three dozen COVID-19 deaths this month – that saw the highest death toll per capon in the Commonwealth.
As the first spate of coronavirus cases in the spring devastated urban hubs like Philadelphia and New York City, rural hospitals in Pennsylvania were planning and waiting. But many residents have sat over COVID-19 restrictions and do not yet see the devastation first-hand. Masking is often considered political, and the mitigating efforts lightly in towns have been largely unaffected by the virus.
But now, it has arrived.
Under the leadership of Mifflin, the death rate from coronavirus is increasing this month in most provinces in Pennsylvania. Blair County, where not a single death was reported in the early April boom, saw 52 in the first two weeks of December. Westmoreland’s total jumped sixfold, from 15 to 93.
Since inheriting his family’s funeral home in Lewistown, a small central Pennsylvania factory in Lewistown, a decade ago, Burke, 45, has been no stranger to being deep in death before lunch. But these days, while the coronavirus is wreaking havoc in its rural hometown north of the June River, it is different.
“It came out of nowhere,” said Burke, whose three funeral homes handle about 25 deaths in a typical November, but last month there were 61. In the first weeks of December, he saw 40.
‘Three months ago,’ he said, ‘I was not really worried about what was happening now. Our suppliers told us to be ready. And you know, we got ready this way, but mentally we have no idea it’s going to happen. ‘
Burke said these days that he and his brother-in-law rearranged the bodies in the back freezer for half an hour to make room for more. The corpse shoulder calls and offers a cooling truck to hold the corpses.
“I pray to God that we do not have to bring one in,” he said.
Seventy miles west of Lewistown, the Conemaugh Nason Medical Center is located between church towers and red barns in Roaring Spring, Blair County, a rural hospital with 45 beds, accustomed to the constant rhythms of flu and broken bones. The hospital, about 55 miles south of State College, even leases some of its land to local farmers.
“Soybeans are being planted north of the hospital,” said Timothy Harclerode, the hospital’s chief executive. “It’s wheat in the south.”
In the first two weeks of April, the country did not report any COVID-19 deaths, but it did not last. Within the first two weeks of December, 52 people died from the virus.
The hospital averaged about 14 overnight patients per day, pre-coronavirus, in 2019. For the last two months, the average has risen to 30.
According to the state’s data, the first confirmed death occurred in Blair County on May 12. By that date, Philadelphia had already endured more than 1,250 deaths.
Across the state, hospitals were still getting ready for the rush, canceling selection measures, getting as much PVB as possible and turning to tele-health appointments instead of visiting the patient.
But while the pandemic is raging elsewhere, some are questioning virus mitigation measures, carrying machines and closing restaurant and gyms to politics as the 2020 election approaches.
“There are people who know no one who has the virus here, and they think the media has blown it out of proportion,” said Bryan Sipes, who runs a braai down the street from Conemaugh Nason, where medical staff for a Christmas in the COVID-19 section. “There are people who got it and recovered, and 85-year-olds who have lung problems, and they died.”
Sipes said his road business increased during the pandemic, but it did not compensate for the money he lost.
‘Most of my business was catering. It was all canceled, “he said.
Sipes said he was not wearing a mask.
“I just can not,” he said.
Dawn Greene, a dental assistant who lives in Hollidaysburg, said she had never left the house without a mask since March. She still contracted COVID-19 and was sent to the emergency room on Thanksgiving. She said she was still dealing with effects of the virus.
Greene, who voted for President Donald Trump, said she was frustrated with how divisive and symbolic masks have become in her neighborhood.
“Everyone thinks their freedoms are taken away and things like that,” Greene, 43, said. ‘But trust me, if you get as sick as I do, you’ll wear a mask. You would get it. I get very upset when I hear people belittle it. I do not want to wish this on anyone. ”
Of the 150 deaths in Blair, 114 were in November and December.
In Westmoreland County, which experienced 15 deaths in early April, compared with 93 in the first weeks of December, attitudes toward the virus were similarly mixed as some officials opposed the temporary restrictions imposed by Governor Tom Wolf, who conducts indoor dining and gatherings. restrict. However, Frank Kapr, owner of the Scottdale funeral home, says he has seen the view of the virus change after people or their families were personally affected.
“There were those who said, ‘You know it’s political, after the election it’s going to disappear,’ and I said, ‘No, I do not think so … you are misleading yourself in this, this COVID-19 is really ” said Kapr, president of the Pennsylvania Funeral Home Association and director of his family’s funeral home for the past 40 years.
Although he saw the virus take hold in Harrisburg, Philadelphia and New Jersey in the spring, “I never thought we would be bombed.”
“The only thing I can tell people right now is to use your mask wherever you go, and stay safe,” he said.
It is the wearing of masks and other mitigation efforts that are used in Philadelphia – such as the restriction of indoor dining and gatherings – that dr. Debra Bogen, director of the Allegheny County Department of Health, encouraged residents to follow suit during a news conference last week. Allegheny County, currently a focal point for cases in the Commonwealth, experienced 46 deaths in the first weeks of April and 217 within the first weeks of December – an increase mainly attributed to the spread of the community, Bogen said. Philadelphia saw 173 deaths in the first weeks of December, up from 354 in early April.
Like many public health officials in the state, Bogen urged the country to hold on to mitigating the spread while they in turn waited for a vaccine, calling it ‘the light at the end of the tunnel we’re all looking for and hoped. this last number of months. ”
At Conemaugh Nason, employees received their first doses of the vaccine on Friday, and Harclerode said many people are worried about the upcoming holiday and how it will affect patients. Sometimes, when COVID-positive patients had similar timelines and symptoms, the hospital would place two in one room.
“We tried to give them someone to talk to,” he said.
Harclerode said he believes there has been ‘COVID fatigue’ in rural areas, and that residents are finally starting to gather again. The hospital saw nails after July 4, Labor Day and Thanksgiving, and expects one after Christmas.
“There are usually very few patients and staff here at Christmas,” he said. “That will not be the case this year.”
Nine months into the pandemic and the state-specific coronavirus restrictions, no matter how many times Kapr has to tell the grieving families that only ten people are allowed to attend an indoor funeral, the pain is always fresh.
“I know most of my families, and I know them very well,” he said. ‘And it’s hard for me to sit on the other side of the desk and tell them that this is what we need to do. They say, what about our grandchildren? It’s hard. ”
The work is hard and emotionally stressful, said Burke, the funeral director at Mifflin. And it’s the hardest when he has to cremate or embalm a friend or acquaintance from his hometown, where everyone knows everyone. But he has only taken two days off in the past two months, despite a recent foot of snow, despite stress, arriving at his office before the sun rises. He said he would not stop now, and that he owed it to the people in the congregation to give them the dispatches they deserved.
“We’re just trying to do what’s right, you know,” he said. “We work hard so we can sleep well at night.”
By OONA GOODIN-SMITH, JASON NARK, DYLAN PURCELL and TIM TAI, The Philadelphia Investigator
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