Spain’s Funeral Workers Demand Quick Vaccine Access

ASSOCIATIONS representing Spain’s funeral workers have demanded quick access to the country’s vaccine rollout scheme as they are highly exposed to the Covid-19 virus.

Spain’s largest funeral worker associations, Aesprof and Panasef, have called on the Ministry of Health to add them to include their workers in the country’s vaccine rollout as soon as possible.

Aesprof claims that Spain’s 11,000 funeral workers and their families are at high risk of contracting the virus due to handling infected bodies and meeting relatives who may be positive cases. Funeral workers are not included in the March phase of the government’s vaccine rollout, and at the earliest could receive doses by June which the unions say is not quick enough.

The association complains that funeral workers operate in a “taboo industry” that find themselves at the “bottom rung of the social ladder” and says that their sector has been neglected by the government during the crisis.

Panasef, which represents 1200 funeral companies, says its members have suffered from “extreme mental and physical exhaustion” during the pandemic that has seen over 60,000 deaths across Spain. They say the country suffers from a huge deficit in trained funeral staff, though the number of funeral workers has grown by 30% during the last year to meet the spike in demand wrought by Covid.

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