- Refrigerated trucks that carried victims of the
coronavirus may still be reused to carry food. - The US Food and Drug Administration released a handbook to help the
trucking and grocery industry figure out how to convert those trucks back to their original purpose. - Even if "bodily fluids" have leaked onto the truck, the FDA says it's still OK to use it to move food again.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Since late March, medical workers and funeral directors in coronavirus hotspots like New York City have been forced to store coronavirus victims in refrigerated trucks.
These trucks are typically used to move food. Now, the owners of those trucks have asked the US Food and Drug Administration how to convert their big rigs back into food haulers — and if it's even allowed.
Following that request for guidance, the FDA has released a ghoulish handbook on how to convert refrigerated trucks back into their typical purpose. Its title? "Returning refrigerated transport vehicles and refrigerated storage units to food uses after using them to preserve human remains during the COVID-19 pandemic."
"During the COVID-19 pandemic, additional refrigerated storage is needed for human remains," the FDA document reads. "Therefore, refrigerated food transport vehicles and refrigerated food storage units ordinarily used for food preservation may be temporarily used to preserve human remains.
"When additional refrigerated storage is no longer needed, industry may wish to return the trailers and storage units to use for food transport and storage."
As the number of those dead from the coronavirus overwhelms morgues, images have captured forklifts moving bodies onto trucks or Wawa shuttling a truck up to New Jersey to protect victims' remains. One emergency-room physician in New York City called the refrigerated truck "our era's defining symbol" in a column for The Washington Post.
"Every disaster has its images, its symbols," Dr. Jeremy Rose of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Beth wrote in the Post. "For covid-19, it might just be the refrigerator truck. It's our overflow morgue, holding the patients we could not save."
The handbook, which contains mere recommendations rather than law, makes it clear that all surfaces of the food-transport truck need to be "thoroughly cleaned and disinfected" with EPA-registered cleaning materials, and may need to be cleaned multiple times. Air and water sprays should not be used, and workers "may need" personal protective gear while cleaning the trucks.
Chillingly, if blood or bodily fluids leaked onto the truck's interior surfaces, the FDA says the truck is still OK to carry food.
However, if the contaminated surface is unfinished wood, cracked fiberglass, or another material that cannot be properly disinfected, the truck should be tossed. The FDA also urges grocers to not use the vehicle for to moving food if it "is permeated by offensive odors that cannot be eliminated through cleaning and disinfecting."