Refrigerated trucks are storing bodies amid spike in COVID-19 deaths in North Texas
Two refrigerated trucks acquired by the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office to store bodies amid the COVID-19 surge in North Texas are in use as of Tuesday, according to officials at the medical examiner’s office.
Officials began using the trucks, each able to store 50 bodies, on Dec. 26.
Authorities acquired the trucks on Dec. 3 in anticipation of a pandemic surge during and through the holidays.
The trucks are parked near the medical examiner’s office, 200 Feliks Gwozdz Place.
Officials said because of constant changes in the body count, they could not provide a number of bodies in the trucks as Tuesday.
“Many of the local area hospitals and larger funeral homes have reached their storage capacity or will reach the total storage capacity soon,” said Chief Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani in a December news release.
The normal capacity at the medical examiner’s office is 100 bodies, according to KXAS-TV.
The medical examiner facility in Fort Worth has three walk-in coolers that can store 100 bodies, Peerwani said in the news release.
As of Monday, Tarrant County had reported a total of 159,931 COVID-19 cases, including 1,542 deaths and an estimated 116,035 recoveries.
Hospitalized COVID patients in the county increased to a pandemic-high 1,428.
COVID-19 hospitalizations accounted for 30.4% of the total number of beds in Tarrant County and make up 38% of the 3,781 occupied beds.
The need for the refrigerated trucks also stems from an increase of homicides in Fort Worth in 2020.
Fort Worth had 112 homicides last year, the most in the city in 26 years. Until 2020, there had not been a triple-digit homicide toll in a year since 1995, when there were 108 victims.
