South Korea's COVID-19 deaths strain crematories, hospitals

Health officials in South Korea have instructed crematories to burn more bodies per day and funeral homes to add more refrigerators to store the dead as families struggle with funeral arrangements amid a rise in COVID-19 deaths. The country has been dealing with a massive coronavirus outbreak driven by the fast-moving omicron variant, which has compromised a once robust pandemic response and is driving up hospitalizations and fatalities. Officials have already allowed the 60 crematories across country to burn for longer hours starting last week, which raised their combined capacity from around 1,000 to 1,400 cremations per day. But that hasn’t been enough to meaningfully ease the backlog of bodies waiting to be cremated in the densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, which is home to half of South Korea’s 52 million people and the center of its COVID-19 outbreak.