Coronavirus, impact on the cemetery and funeral system

The Covid19 pandemic has affected every system

The Covid19 pandemic that hit Italy, and the world, in the early 2020s had repercussions in every economic system and sector.

The healthcare system had to react to the sudden increase in beds, intensive care, provision of services and personnel.

At the same time, fortunately not in the same proportion, the cemetery and funeral system also faced numerous difficulties due to the simultaneous demand for transport, cremations and burials.

Generally speaking, today the cemetery system can cope fairly well with mortality increases, compared to the past. However, in this emergency phase, some measures by the Ministry of Health and Civil Protection were necessary, others will probably be indispensable in the near future.

It is important to focus on the following:

  • the possibility of increasing the capacity of crematoria;
  • the possibility of assessing, in medium-sized cities, the ability to react to increased demand through stress tests;
  • the streamlining of authorisation procedures;
  • the use of simplified procedures for the purchase of goods and services by municipalities.

In many respects, cemetery management has been delegated to the municipalities, which may adopt specific ordinances, even deviating from state regulations, if necessary to cope with the emergency.

Municipalities among other things can:

  • manage the distribution of burials in burial niches or pits according to space availability;
  • letting outsiders share empty places in family graves;
  • recover places in burial niches or pits through massive exhumations;
  • carry out exhumations aimed at the combined burial of several remains.

A rethink of cemetery master plans is also needed by municipalities: the functions and structure must be able to cope with both ordinary and epidemic burials.

During epidemics, for example, it is important to provide funeral transport and burial very quickly in order to guarantee public health; this has meant that the right to cremation, for which the timeframe is still too long and the available facilities insufficient, has not been guaranteed.

Efficiency in carrying out activities during an epidemic phase is therefore essential to ensure health and safety: frequent sanitisation of spaces, use of anti-viral devices, use of equipment that speeds up operations can ensure rapid burials, without risk of contagion.

The lack of a pandemic plan and the problems of the institutional set-up between State-Regions-Municipalities will necessarily have to be defined and resolved in the near future to ensure that deadlock situations no longer occur.