SEOUL -- While the rising Covid fatalities in South Korea have driven up demand for coffins, supplies of the Chinese paulownia wood used to make them have been dwindling.

According to the Korean news agency, Hankyoreh, since the start of March, the supply crunch has been severe, according to sources in the coffin-making community. With the number of COVID-19 deaths more than quintupling in South Korea over the past month amid the spread of the virus’s Omicron variant, funeral coffins have been in scarce supply.

“With the sharp rise in orders, not just our ordinary suppliers but also our alternative ones have been unable to provide coffins [when orders come],” said Lee Bae-yeon, who runs the Gangwon Company, a coffin manufacturing business based in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi Province.

A representative of another coffin manufacturer in the greater Seoul area said, “Where we’ve ordinarily produced 2,000 coffins in a month, the number recently has been in the range of 3,000 to 3,500.”

“Normally, we stockpiled enough [coffins] for two to three months, but now it’s only enough for two weeks. With lumber in such short supply, we’ve been making some of the coffins with furniture wood rather than coffin wood,” the source explained.

The number of COVID-19 deaths in South Korea has risen sharply in the month of March. While the death tolls for January and February were 1,169 and 1,303, respectively, a total of 6,841 fatalities had been counted for March as of Sunday — more than five times the number of deaths in February.

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