Ernie Alvarez cleared the wreath of red roses and the pedestals carrying Asiatic lilies alongside yellow cushion poms, until all that remained was a simple gray casket.

Turning a metal crank, he lowered a white bed holding the body of 67-year-old Jorge Gamarra, as his family whispered their last goodbyes. They caressed the top of Gamarra’s head and then departed before Alvarez shut the lid.

“The hardest part of my business is dealing with people who you don't expect to die,” Alvarez, 50, said inside his funeral home in Passaic City. As the masked mourners headed to their cars and the final burial on February 26th, his staff carried the casket to a hearse parked outside. So went their 39th COVID-19 funeral service here since 2021 began.

This trail of death extends back to the earliest moments of the coronavirus pandemic. Alvarez has been working in mortuary services since he was 17, but the crushing amount of bodies he witnessed last April was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Most visitors to his two funeral homes—the other in Paterson—are Latino.

“One reason why it spread so much in our community is we do have two-family houses, and they have three families living in it. That’s how they make it. They chip in and pay the mortgage,” he said. “That’s also how I’ve gotten multiple people from the same family die.”

His hunch is right. Passaic City and Paterson are the two most Latino towns in New Jersey’s most Latino county, also named Passaic. They’re also among the state’s most densely packed regions. COVID-19 devastated these predominantly Latino areas as the virus spread through tight webs of multigenerational and multifamily homes.

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