The head of the “Ritual” Ekimov: the load on the funeral sphere is increasing due to the waves of COVID-19 Artem Yekimov spoke about the burden on the funeral sphere due to waves of deaths from COVID-19. He said in an interview with RBC that the “peaks” were in June-July 2021, as well as November and May 2020.
According to him, the number of burials in Moscow increased by 25-30 percent, while the growth is abrupt.
“At the stage of obscurity, at the peak of the first wave in 2020, we could carry out burials of up to 600 bodies daily … This is compared to 300 in the non-crisis period,” emphasized Yekimov. He added that at the moment the figures for the number of burials are closer to “demographically adequate”, and are typical for the periods between waves. According to him, there were no queues in Moscow for burial and cremation during the pandemic.
In September of this year, Ritual carried out 7810 burials, from January to September – 85.5 thousand. In the same periods of 2020, there were 8851 and 87.2 thousand burials, which differs from the pre-pandemic period. So, from January to September 2019, 77.7 thousand burials were carried out, during the same time in 2018 – 76.1 thousand.
On November 12, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said that the share of coronavirus among the causes excess mortality in Russia for nine months of 2021 exceeds 90 percent. Of the total number of excess mortality in Russia in the first nine months of this year, 91.2 percent is accounted for by COVID-19.