Spike in deaths forces Sacramento coroner to request extra money for transport, cremations

The Sacramento County coroner has requested an additional $250,000 from county supervisors to continue handling the increased number of deaths during the coronavirus pandemic.

The higher-than-normal volume has strained an existing agreement with a Sacramento company that transports bodies from local hospitals, and cremates and buries indigent patients, said county coroner Kimberly D. Gin.

The county coroner has partnered with Statewide Mortuary Transport & Support since 2016 but the maximum $1,250,000 cap on its contract has already been reached. Meanwhile, the coroner’s office began seeing more deaths and cases that required transports starting in March 2020 — just as the pandemic began sweeping California.

The Board of Supervisors will consider Gin’s funding request at its regular meeting Tuesday.

“We’ve had to guess where our caseload is going to be from year to year. In 2020 and 2021, the deaths have been higher than they were in 2019,” Gin said. “We just couldn’t anticipate what was going to happen with the pandemic.”

Gin said most of her cases are not directly linked to the pandemic since deaths involving COVID-19 are considered from natural causes. Her office investigates cases that include overdoses, car accidents and homicides.

“But we’re seeing an increase in a lot of other types of deaths like the rest of the country,” Gin said.

Across the country, a 17% increase in deaths

Gin said she does not yet have data to show the size of the increase in Sacramento.

Researchers have been able to glean some trends from death certificates and estimate the rising mortality nationally. Two researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention measured mortality across the 12 leading causes of death and compared them over the last six years.

In their article published in the Journal of American Medicine last month, they concluded there was a 17% increase in the number of deaths in 2020, which was about 504,000 more than in 2019. Notably, the estimated COVID-19-related deaths accounted for about 345,000 people.

The researchers found substantial increases in the number of deaths attributed to heart disease, which increased by 4.8%; influenza and pneumonia, which jumped by 7.5%; and unintentional injuries, including overdoses, which jumped by 11%.

A rise in Alzheimer’s cases has contributed to Sacramento County’s higher death rate in 2020, according to a Bee review of CDCP data. The death rate in Sacramento County jumped 11% last year, rising to levels not seen in at least 50 years, preliminary state data show. About 13,280 Sacramento County residents died in 2020, or 850 deaths per 100,000 residents.

Gin said more specific data on the recent spike in cases investigated by her office will have to wait.

“I don’t have a good handle on what it is specifically except that we know our homicides are up. I would imagine our drug overdoses are up but I don’t have a way to track that right now,” gin said. “And we’re so busy we’re not getting our cases closed as fast as we normally do because of the high caseloads.”