WATCH: Mobeni Heights crematorium opens
By Anelisa Kubheka
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Durban - Plans are afoot to get a new cremator into the Tongaat Crematorium to replace the old one.
This was as the Mobeni Heights Crematorium after years, opened its doors to the public who previously had to carry the extra cost of using a private crematorium.
On Monday the facility had already begun its order of business cremating bodies.
Maggie Govender, an ANC constituency MPL in Chatsworth, said their office had received many queries from the community about this facility. We have in the past raised the matter with the municipality and were told it would be opened in February. We have been pushing together with councillors in the city and within the Cogta portfolio committee to have this facility operating back to normal. Yesterday (Sunday) I confirmed with the deputy city manager for Community and Emergency Services, Dr Musa Gumede, who said the facility was functioning with people on site, she said.
On 25 January 2021, the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid-19 released a memorandum stating that, following a re-evaluation of the evidence, dead Covid-19 bodies should no longer be deemed contagious after they have exhaled their last breath and released their final bodily fluids. It was therefore advised that it was only necessary for these bodies to be bagged in plastic from the hospital to the mortuary, but not thereafter.
The next day, the National Funeral Practitioners Association of South Africa (Nafupa SA) met with the departments of health and home affairs and then released a notice to members stating that the new ruling meant that “we are returning to the normal way of conducting funerals” and that this would “allow families to observe their cultural beliefs”.
Mortuaries accused of mixing corpses which increases Covid-19 infections
By Sakhile Ndlazi
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Pretoria - Mortuaries in the city have been accused of storing bodies of people who had tested positive for Covid-19 with those who died of other causes.
In a voice note, a city mortuary was accused of recklessly storing the body of a deceased with another who had died from Covid-19 complications.
A pastor recorded in the voice note, said a private pathologist declared the deceased Covid-19 negative, but the body got infected in storage and nearly wiped out the family.
A Mahube resident said because their loved one had one tested negative for Covid-19, the casket was open during the funeral. They only discovered later that the deceased had shared a compartment with a Covid-19 positive person.
Record number of excess deaths in first week of 2021
More than 20,000 South Africans died between 30 December 2020 and 5 January 2021, according to the Burden of Disease Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council. A record 10,907 were excess deaths from natural causes – the vast majority of which are likely attributed to Covid-19, says the council. Unnatural causes – such as accidents and murders – fell below the prediction. As James Stent and Nathan Geffen write:
“By comparison, in the worst years of the Aids epidemic (in the 2000s), there were at most about 6,000 excess deaths due to the disease each week. But this went on year after year, while the current Covid-19 surge will subside in the short-term.”
Grave concern: SA undertakers & burial staff face death, stress amid pandemic The National Funeral Practitioners Association of South Africa s Muzi Hlengwa said the surge in burials meant workers were being exposed to COVID-19 more frequently. FILE: Members of a family dressed in personal protective equipment put the body of a man who died of COVID-19 into a grave during a Muslim burial at the Klip Road Cemetery in Grassy Park, Cape Town, on 9 June 2020. Picture: AFP.
100 days ago
JOHANNESBURG - The National Funeral Practitioners Association of South Africa on Friday said an alarming number of undertakers and burial staff were losing their lives to the coronavirus.