There is not enough space in the funeral home refrigerators, there is no one to bury the dead

An empty lock hangs on the door in the workshop of a long-time Panevėžys jeweler.

“On Friday we said goodbye to everything, on Monday I was no longer at work,” fellow jeweler Tomas Petrauskas told Lietuvos Rytas television reporters. A week later, news came that a longtime colleague had died of a coronavirus.

“I was not a patient, I have known him for 30 years and I do not remember the patient,” said T. Petrauskas.

Dozens of people die every day in the country just from the coronavirus.

The director of the company that offers ritual services in Panevėžys says this is the busiest time in a couple of decades. The workload increased by a third.

“Just physically, you could say, we didn’t finish everything as much as necessary. It probably all consisted of people not visiting doctors, hospitals had some kind of fireplaces. We are really sorry, “said Silvija Talačkienė, manager of” Ramybės takas “funeral home.

Representatives of funeral companies assure that sometimes relatives have to wait to say goodbye to the deceased.

“We have 3 refrigerators and they are all full, sometimes there is even a queue, that’s the situation. Many people are cremated, there is only one line in Kėdainiai, which was completely broken, then we transported people to Riga for cremation, but again there are huge queues, ”said Raimondas Pankevičius, deputy director of Grauduva Funeral Home.

According to the head of the ritual services company, it happens that there is no one left to bury the deceased. A specially equipped closet stores urns with the ashes of the dead, which currently cannot be collected by loved ones.

“People have left and are ill, we had cases where only the whole family is ill or after quarantine,” S. Talačkienė said about the difficult situation.

According to data from the Lithuanian Department of Statistics, a record number of deaths has been recorded in Lithuania in recent weeks.

“These last two weeks have been distinguished by the fact that most people have died in every week, compared to five or even ten years. In all, more than 1,000 people died. On average, around 800 people die in the country per week, ”said Vilma Malinauskienė, representative of Statistics from Lithuania.

According to statistical data, although the number of deaths from coronavirus is increasing, most of the lives of people in Lithuania are caused by diseases of the circulatory system and malignant tumors.