NY – It has become a macabre routine outside New York City hospitals: employees in protective uniforms carry bodies of victims of the coronavirus to refrigerated cars.
The increase in deaths at the epicenter of the crisis in the United States has overtaken the permanent morgues and saturated the storage capacity of the city’s hospitals. The United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) decided to send 85 refrigerated trucks for use as temporary morgues, the city said.
This has been the case for days at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, where an employee on Tuesday removed a corpse covered with white plastic on a stretcher, a forklift operator lifted a body onto the refrigerator trailer and funeral home personnel arrived to collect the remains of another of the nearly 1,000 coronavirus deaths in the city.
The hospital said in a statement that the “unprecedented crisis requires extraordinary measures” and that extra storage is needed “to attend to the tragic increase in deaths, which increases the burden on the entire health system: from hospitals to funeral homes.”
“Grieving families cannot make arrangements quickly, and their deceased loved ones are staying in hospitals longer than usual; hence the need for this alternative space, “said the hospital, located in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The city’s forensic office has also launched a makeshift morgue, just as it did after the September 11, 2001 attacks, to provide emergency space as permanent facilities in the city become saturated.
The city’s death toll from coronavirus has more than doubled in four days, from 450 on Friday to 932 on Tuesday morning.
In most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But in some, especially older adults and people with health problems, the virus can cause severe symptoms like pneumonia and become fatal.
The city and FEMA have delivered the refrigerated trucks to various hospitals, while the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has instructed them on how to properly transport and store the bodies, according to authorities.
“See the scenes of the trailers there and what they are doing with those vehicles: they are refrigerators and nobody can even believe it,” President Donald Trump said Tuesday.
In some hospitals, such as Manhattan’s Lenox Hill, trailers remain parked on streets, next to sidewalks, and in front of apartments. Vehicles and buses passed by as the bodies were loaded Tuesday outside the Brooklyn Hospital Center.
In various videos taken on cell phones and broadcast over the weekend on social networks, it was striking that hospitals used trailers to store bodies.
He New York Post Today posted a front-page video image of activity outside the Brooklyn Hospital Center.
“It’s hard to believe this, but it’s real,” said the man who recorded the video in a shaky voice. “Lord, have mercy, help us, Lord, this is real.”
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