I read a very old Sci-Fi short story like this many, many years ago -— where everyone became fascinated with death and crawled into coffins to lay down and die. It ended with everyone dead except an old prospector named Mr. Adams, and his donkey. As he’s walking away, he says something like “Well, they’ve done it again Eve. I guess we’ll have to start over again, and this time I hope they don’t take after you so much.”
Some kind of a closed container with warm, body temperature water and completely in the dark and silence people would .... well ... I don't know why they did it
I just remember reading about it