As the number of COVID-19 cases swell across New York City, funeral homes are scrambling to meet the demand of the pandemic's body count, with estimations that the number of services for those who've passed will continue to skyrocket as we head towards the presumptive peak of the virus.

Patrick Kearns, owner of the 120-year-old Leo F. Kearns, Inc. funeral home service, said his network of funeral parlors has never seen demand like this in the 25 years he took over the business, which is largely based in Queens, the borough that is hardest-hit by the virus, with 16,819 reported cases as of Thursday morning.

“This is beyond anything that anyone ever imagines,” said Kearns, a fourth-generation funeral director.

The surge is just beginning for Kearns, who tracks the number of clients serviced by his network of funeral homes. On March 15, he logged 15 clients. By March 31, he served another 50, making for 65 total, a 60 percent rise from his usual monthly intake. He’s still evaluating how many of these new cases are related to coronavirus, though he suspects half of them to be virus-related.

In the Bronx, Joseph A. Lucchese of his eponymous funeral home in Morris Park has been inundated with calls. Much like Kearns, Lucchese has been the busiest in the 30 years he's served in the industry.

"When this first started, I really thought it was bullshit, and it's not," he said of the virus. "There is a lot of people dying out there and it's really, really scary."

Across the five boroughs and beyond, funeral homes are seeing more and more grieving families calling for arrangements, according to Michael Lanotte, Executive Director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association who calls the uptick “unprecedented.”

“We have definitely had funeral directors in and around the New York City area—Westchester, Rockland, and Long Island, who are really being put to task in terms of the number of families that are calling on them to help them and deal with loss,” said Lanotte. “Every day becomes a little bit more challenging due to the volume that we’re seeing.”

With a greater demand put on him and his staff, Kearns told Gothamist that even getting help loading a body into a vehicle for transport poses challenges. “In most cases you’re lucky to have one hospital orderly and morgue attendant assist my director in getting the body out of the trailer and putting it into our vehicle. It’s a difficult task,” said Kearns. The city has now purchased 45 more mobile morgues, and expected to receive another 85 refrigerated trucks brought in by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The U.S. Department of Defense is also dispatching 42 mortuary officers to help the New York City Medical Examiner's Office handle the extra load.

“And it’s [an] extremely, emotionally, and physically overwhelming task to be in a tractor trailer that’s just full of bodies. It's a lot. It’s a lot for anyone. Even if you’re a professional who’s used to some level of being around death," he said. "But that’s what we’ve been called to do.”

Lily Sage, a resident funeral director at a parlor in Harlem several months away from obtaining her license, has retrieved some of the bodies at hospitals, finding herself inside refrigerated morgues tracking down the bodies for collection.

“[T]he people who die get dragged all the way to the back and are sort of laid on the floor in rows. And as a funeral director you have to come in with your stretcher and walk through the rows trying to identify people by their tags and then once you do find the person you’re looking for you have to find a way to get them out of the trailer cause they’re on the floor. So luckily my stretcher drops to the ground and I can put somebody on it and lift them back up,” said Sage.

“After a certain point I worry that people will become numbers and this will become work, and that is typically a sign of burnout, when you should leave a profession that’s based on compassion, and I just don’t see a way for funeral directors not to be burned out,” said Sage.

Lucchese said staffing issues at hospitals has caused him to wait even longer to get a death certificate which is needed to obtain the body from the hospital and signed electronically through facial recognition by a doctor utilizing the state's Electronic Death Registration System. Other pedigree information is added by the funeral director and then filed by New York City Health Department, which then authorizes a burial or cremation. "A lot of times there's a bit of a lag in that because they're so overwhelmed with the people who are dying," said Lucchese.

Lanotte noted that on a typical day one would see an average 425 deaths across the state well before the virus hit. “The reality is we’re probably getting close to twice the number of deaths on average per day that we would normally see,” said Lanotte. “You’ll have twice the number of funerals eventually.”

Funeral directors are adhering to state guidelines following the outbreak by only allowing immediate family members to attend in-person services, so long as they practice social distancing. The workaround for funeral homes to accommodate friends and extended family kept from attending has been live streaming its services via Facebook Live or Zoom.

Lucchese has opted to limit in-person funerals to a maximum of three a day, running every two hours. Between each session, the parlor is cleaned for one hour to prevent the spread of infection. "We've adjusted our prices downward because we're not offering the services that we normally would be offering," said Lucchese. "It's just not fair to families since they're not spending the time in the funeral home that they normally would be spending."

For Kearns, even before a service happens, his team goes to great lengths ensuring his staffers are protected as the body is embalmed, which doubles as a disinfectant for when families view the body in person.

“It’s very important for a family to get to say goodbye,” said Kearns. “In many cases, these people, if you’re dying from COVID, the last time your family saw you is when the ambulance took you away. And then you’re in the hospital, you’re dying alone, and then the idea that you’re buried alone, or cremated alone, without anybody saying goodbye to you is difficult and it shouldn’t happen. People should not be forced to do that.”

In the Orthodox Jewish communities of Brooklyn, there are "bodies on top of bodies," as one funeral director from an Orthodox funeral home in Borough Park told The Forward. With more coronavirus-related deaths, Kavod v'Nichum, a national group assisting Orthodox Jewish burial societies, is now advising that purifying and guarding of bodies cease for now. Shivas are now being conducted virtually.

While the magnitude of the number of funerals has overloaded funeral homes, families burying their loved ones have found grieving

Felice Donatiello, a Connecticut resident whose 91-year-old cousin from Manhattan died from the virus this past Monday. Even before her passing, Donatiello, couldn’t be by his cousin’s bedside as she was hospitalized.

“It was tough,” said Donatiello. “Kind of traumatic for myself because I was the person she depended on and she was calling me and I couldn’t be there with her, so I had to comfort her over the phone.”

Donatiello’s cousin, whom he asked not to be named, was taken to Lucchese’s funeral home shortly after the body was brought from the hospital. Donatiello said he went into the funeral home donning a mask and gloves. The rest of his family stayed outside, fearing the virus.

Donatiello said he had attendees form a procession to the cemetery as a way of mourning his cousin’s death.

“What I requested was the church in the Bronx, Mt. Carmel [Church], where she got married and where she wanted her funeral," recounted Donatiello. We were able to stop in front of the church for five minutes, and I thought that was really beautiful."

For now, Donatiello is grieving at home alone since “we can’t be together with the family.”