KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A vaccine for COVID-19 could be approved within days, but it comes as the Kansas City metro has lost so many loved ones that funeral homes are now booked weeks in advanced.
"It's emotional on the family. It's emotional on the staff and the team as a whole," Michael Adkins, owner of the Serenity Funeral Home, said.
Staff at the Serenity Funeral Home are working seven days a week to meet the demand as more people lose their life to COVID-19.
"But we can only do so many services a day, and so now we're booking maybe three weeks out, and I'm talking about every day, sometimes two and three a day," Adkins said.
He also said the South Kansas City facility handled the arrangements for the first COVID-19 death in the metro.
"It was probably a little over a month before we were able to do the actual service and then burial for the very first one," Adkins said.
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Since then, they've served the families of 70 to 80 people who have died to due to the novel coronavirus.
In the five years Serenity Funeral Home has been in operation, its staff made arrangements for about 250 cases annually. This year, they have done more than 450 with three weeks remaining in the year.
"The way we conduct services, the way we meet with families, the way we have to operate daily, everyday has changed," Adkins said.
It's done with compassion because for some staff, COVID is personal.
"The loss of my grandmother early in April – we weren't able to physically hug one another. We weren't able to just [give] a handshake when people come in, you know, all the things that are thoughtful that you feel like you need at that time. You can't do that," Ryan Strickland Sr., apprentice funeral director at the Serenity Funeral Home, said. "And so it's hard when you see grieving widows and widowers and mothers and fathers that need that love and support that we once used to do. We can't do that anymore."
Among the changes, the funeral home now offers a livestream of funeral services to limit seating at 150 and a crew deep cleans nightly to make sure everyone stays healthy.
"It's a thriving business and everyone wants to succeed in their business," Strickland said. "But I don't think that they want to succeed in a pandemic like this."
In total, more than 1,100 people have lost their lives to the virus in the Kansas City metro.
The highest number of deaths for the entire pandemic happened at the end of October. Last week was just one death shy of that record.
