Inside look at morgue coping with virus deaths

(12 May 2020) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: apus135984

One of the nation's busiest morgues is facing an unprecedented surge in death cases it must process each day during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Chicago area's chief medical examiner starts her days with a numbers problem: how to manage three times the number of deaths with the same number of pathologists that her office had before the coronavirus pandemic.
On a recent morning when The Associated Press got exclusive access to the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office for the day, Dr. Ponni Arunkumar scanned a list of 62 new death cases. The average last year was 20 a day.
"I would say about 70 - 75% of the cases are COVID-19 patients. We have received a little more than 2,000 COVID cases since March 16," Dr. Arunkumar said.  
The hope was that stay-at-home orders would at least reduce shooting deaths in Chicago, keeping cases at more manageable levels. That hasn't happened, with around the same number of homicides in the first four months of this year as the same period last year.

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