Health officials on Sunday said three public mortuaries had reached 90 per cent capacity with 1,350 bodies in the past week due to a record number of deaths resulting from an exponential rise in infections.

Public hospitals have also experienced difficulties in transporting corpses in a timely manner. Some have remained in accident and emergency departments for up to a day before being transferred to mortuaries.

Covid-19: bodies pile up at hospitals, mortuaries struggle to find space in Hong Kong

Authorities on Monday revealed another 124 infected residents had died, 87 of them in the past 24 hours and the remaining 37 before that but only reported now due to a backlog, taking the overall tally to 851. Hong Kong also confirmed a record 34,466 infections, bringing the tally of cases since the pandemic began to 205,780.

“I think this is a very special situation,” said Dr Larry Lee Lap-yip, a chief manager at the Hospital Authority, adding the pressure on mortuaries was “dramatic”.

“We have some gridlock in the transferring of the corpses from the emergency department to the public mortuary. This is the bottleneck that we are working very hard on.”

Dr Ho Pak-leung, an infectious disease expert from the University of Hong Kong, said the risk of transmission from corpses was low.

“It’s far lower than going out every day, taking the subway, going to a shopping centre, and eating in restaurants,” Ho told a radio programme.

The corpses of Covid-19 victims are now classified as category two under guidelines for handling bodies issued by health authorities, meaning additional precautions need to be taken.

According to government guidelines on preparing the bodies of Covid-19 patients, the corpse must first be placed in a robust and leakproof transparent plastic bag which is at least 150 micrometres thick and should be zipped shut by health care workers.

When the body is transferred to the parlour, embalming is not permitted but viewings at the funeral and preparation, including mortuary make-up, are allowed. Cremation is also recommended.

However, the city’s three major funeral parlours said they would not arrange make-up and viewings for bodies.

Hong Kong Funeral Home in North Point told a Post reporter posing as a client: “The body bag will be completely wrapped at the morgue. We will not open it due to the risk of transmission. Family members of the deceased can then decide if they want to hold a funeral in the parlour or just send the body directly for cremation.”

Two other parlours, Universal Funeral in Hung Hom and Po Fook Memorial Hall in Tai Wai, also said the body must be wrapped and placed in a coffin before it was sent to their funeral homes.

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Patrick Leung, sales director of Kowloon Funeral Parlour in Tai Kok Tsui, said he was considering offering an all-in-one package including body make-up, viewing services and two halls for families of Covid-19 victims.

But he said the funeral home needed to consider the extra hiring costs first since it only had one driver and two undertakers available as nearly 10 staff members had been infected with the coronavirus.

Leung also pointed out that the requirement for the infected body to remain bagged clashed with the process of preparing the corpse for viewing.

He added that the process could endanger staff even if they wore protective gear.

In Hong Kong, seven licensed funeral parlours have service halls and mortuary facilities for the storage and handling of human remains.

Additional reporting by Gigi Choy