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Siriraj Hospital Give Wrong Corpse, Inform Family at Funeral

Staff from a Bangkok hospital stopped a funeral just before a body was about to be cremated to inform the family that they had been handed the wrong body by mistake.

After learning that the wrong corpse had been handed away, personnel from Bangkok’s Siriraj Hospital rushed to the ceremony and informed the family that “the bodies were switched.”

According to the husband of the 55-year-old woman who died of cancer after contracting Covid-19, he picked up his wife’s remains from the Siriraj Hospital. There was no name tag on the body, which was kept in a zipped bag.

He claims he requested authorities to double-check that his wife’s body was in the bag, which they did.

Monks traditionally sing for three to seven days during Buddhist funeral rites, but since the epidemic, many have reduced the procedures to only one day for the cremation ceremony. To avoid the spread of Covid-19, hospitals bring the bodies of persons who died while infected with the virus to cremation ceremonies, and families are instructed not to open the sealed body bag.

When the medical workers couldn’t find the body for another family, the husband informed by Siriraj that they realized their error. He urged officials to unzip the bag so he could establish that he had been given his wife’s body since he had lost faith in the hospital.

The hospital released a letter apologizing for their error and promising to investigate and avoid such situations from occurring in the future.