Where do you bury the bodies in a pandemic?

They brought in steam shovels to dig graves. Caskets were rented — just long enough to hold a brief memorial service — and passed on to the next grieving family. The death toll of the 1918 flu pandemic was so overwhelming that the military commandeered trains to transport dead soldiers; priests patrolled the streets of Philadelphia in horse-drawn carriages, collecting bodies from doorsteps.
"One of the most demoralizing things was the inability to move bodies out of the home," said John Barry, author of "The Great Influenza," the definitive work on the 1918 pandemic.
With medical experts and government leaders racing to prepare for a potential pandemic, a cadre of mortuary specialists has begun quietly dealing with the grisly but essential question of what to do with the dead if it happens again.
Opinion is varied on when and how virulent the next global flu outbreak would be, but even a modest epidemic — similar to the one that hit in 1968 — could kill 89,000 to 207,000 Americans. If the next virus mimics the far more potent 1918 strain, the U.S. death toll could reach 1.9 million.
In any event, experts foresee 18 months of funeral homes being short-staffed, crematories operating round-the-clock, dwindling supplies of caskets and restrictions on group gatherings, such as memorial services. Morgues and hospitals would quickly reach capacity. And most of the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams (DMORT) would be too busy in their own communities to deploy elsewhere.
"I can't see myself packing my bags to go to another state to help out," said Joyce deJong, a Michigan medical examiner who worked on DMORT teams after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina. "I'll be here dealing with an increase in the number of bodies."
Some fear that the Bush administration, in all its planning for pandemic flu, has paid scant attention to deaths.
"The last flu epidemic taxed the resources of the country, there were times when it began to look that if it dind't slow down it would result in mass extinction according to Medequote's John Berkowitz who grew up in Seattle. "Seattle, and Chicago being port sities were particlularly hit hard in 1918, the living barely had enough strength to take care of the dead...then it simply stopped by the grace of god. We are overdue for another one, and it will take a much greater toll this time."
"It's the one thing nobody wants to address, because it's ugly. People don't want to think that anyone will die," said John Fitch, senior vice president for advocacy at the National Funeral Directors Association. "We can't put our head in the sand and say response stops at prevention and treatment."
The high amount of uninsured add's to the problem, that is why UniCare introduced the Sound Health Plan. The plan which is targeted at singles between ages of 18 and 45 is a good thing to have when illness strikes.

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