Linn County has refrigeration trucks ready to serve as make-shift morgues, to handle an increase in COVID-19 deaths.

Linn County Medical Examiner Donnie Linder said he is especially aware of the threat of the virus after spending the past week treating patients in hard-hit New Orleans. New Orleans has more than 20,000 confirmed cases with nearly 1,200 deaths across Louisiana.

Besides being a medical examiner, Doctor Linder works as an ER doctor in St. Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids. Linder is also a clinical faculty at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans. He said he was anxious to go there this last week to treat patients, but he says he learned things he can bring back to Linn County.

“We are prepared for mass fatalities, hoping that that doesn't happen. We have a good system with our funeral homes, our hospital leadership, our county leadership, that if needed, we could deploy mobile refrigerated morgue with attendants and security," Linder said.

Linder also said he has concerns about COVID-related deaths getting properly reported.

"Local funeral homes may go out of county to pick up a patient who was COVID-positive and died and that medical examiner jurisdiction wasn't reporting that. These are only stories I've heard from my investigators and other medical examiners, so I don't know for certain whether reporting is accurate. My suspicion, which is the suspicion all over the country, is that it's being under-reported,” he said.

He said one of the biggest needs in Iowa is for more testing and rapid testing. New Orleans hospitals had access to COVID-19 tests that could give a result in minutes. Doctor Linder said those tests aren't readily available here yet. He said the faster results help doctors and also help patients take isolation orders more seriously.