The body of a 79-year-old Covid patient who died on Monday at a private hospital off EM Bypass was not cremated till Friday following a dispute over who will pay for transporting the body to the crematorium, family members said.
The victim’s son said three men clad in personal protective equipment and operating a hearse had gone to the hospital on Wednesday to transport the body to the crematorium at Dhapa. They allegedly demanded Rs 7,000.
The son, a part-time schoolteacher, refused to pay on suspicion that the trio were trying to fleece him. “They left without the body,” the son said.
A similar problem was reported from another private hospital on Friday — hearse operators allegedly asked the families of two Covid victims to pay Rs 5,000 each.
When an official of the hospital called up the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, the civic official said they were unable to send hearses to so many places and that the hospitals or families should contact approved private hearse operators and pay for the transportation.
The three instances once again highlight the problems surrounding the cremation of people dying of Covid-19. “There is no official order from the government or the civic body. How can we ask the family to pay for transporting the body to the crematorium if there is no official order?” asked an official of a private hospital.
In Calcutta, the CMC had so far been sending hearses to hospitals to transport bodies of Covid victims to Dhapa. But with only five hearses at its disposal, the civic body is finding it difficult to manage, said Atin Ghosh, a member of the CMC’s board of administrators who is in charge of the civic health department.
“We have been transporting the bodies from Calcutta and Bidhannagar so far. But it is now becoming impossible for us to transport all bodies. So we have asked the private hospitals to hire the services of private hearse operators approved by the CMC. The hospitals have to pay for the transportation,” Ghosh said on Friday.
Ghosh said the CMC had issued a written communication to private hospitals in this regard, but officials of at least two private hospitals said they had not received it.
According to guidelines issued by the Centre, the body of a Covid-19 victim must be placed “in a leak-proof plastic body bag”.
“The exterior of the body bag can be decontaminated with 1 per cent hypochlorite. The body bag can be wrapped with a mortuary sheet or sheet provided by the family members,” the guidelines say.
“The body, secured in a body bag, exterior of which is decontaminated, poses no additional risk to the staff transporting the dead body.”
Cremation of bodies of Covid-19 victims has been a pain point for the authorities for a while. On Thursday, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had spoken about another problem related to the cremation of people dying of Covid -- the shutdown of the lone crematorium at Dhapa.
“On an average, there are 20-30 bodies. There is only one crematorium in Dhapa. How many bodies can be cremated in one crematorium? That too shuts down at times,” Mamata said.
“Building another crematorium will take at least four months.”
Calcutta has seven other crematoriums. Resistance from residents of the areas where they are located had compelled officials to stop cremation of Covid-19 victims in at least one of the crematoriums.
Subsequently, it was decided that the bodies of all Covid victims in Calcutta and Bidhannagar would be cremated at the Dhapa facility.
