New York City has called in reinforcements to bury bodies in mass graves on Hart Island, near the Bronx, as the death toll from Covid-19 has shattered all records in recent days, reports Reuters.
These mass graves, where nearly a million New Yorkers, often poor or indigent, already lie, could be used for “temporary burials” if “needs increased,” a spokesperson for New York City, Freddi Goldstein.
Normally, some 25 bodies are buried per week in these mass graves, the largest in the United States. But this figure now reaches 25 bodies buried … per day, said Thursday to Reuters Jason Kersten, a spokesman for the prison administration, which oversees these burials, operated by inmates.
Two new trenches dug
The dead are wrapped in body bags, before being placed in pine coffins. The name of each deceased is then inscribed on each coffin, in case the body should ever be exhumed. Then the coffins are then buried in long and narrow trenches. “Two new trenches were dug in case of need,” Jason Kersten told the news agency, specifying contractors had been hired to deal with it.
In New York City, which consolidates its sad status as the center of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States, the question arises today of the fate of the increasingly numerous dead. Because with the increase in deaths in New York State – where there are regularly at least 500 new deaths per day for a week – several undertakers interviewed said they were “overwhelmed”.
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“Most funeral homes have limited refrigeration capacity,” Ken Brewster, owner of a small funeral director in the Queens district, told AFP on Monday, besieged with requests for funerals from Covid patients. 19. “If you don’t have the space, you need these trucks.” The influx is all the stronger as some houses have decided not to take any person who has died of the disease, which is “their right”, he says.
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The funeral directors are so overloaded that an elected municipal official on Monday raised the possibility of carrying out “temporary burials” in a municipal park. In a city already transformed by the pandemic, with tents for the sick pitched in Central Park, this statement immediately struck people. But the town hall quickly qualified the point. “We do not currently plan to use parks as cemeteries,” said spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein.
Towards “temporary burials”?
She admitted, however, that the city was considering using Hart Island. Mayor Bill de Blasio himself spoke on Monday of the possibility of “temporary burials” to “hold out until the end of the crisis”. “We are not there, I will not go into details”, he qualified during a press briefing.
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New York, the densest city in the United States with already more than 72,000 people infected, hopes not to come to that. Governor Andrew Cuomo said Monday that the statewide death toll has stabilized since Saturday, to remain below 600 per day. He nevertheless ordered the extension of the containment measures until April 29, stressing that it was important not to be “too confident” and abandon too early the efforts of social distancing.
VIDEO. Coronavirus in New York: mass graves to alleviate the influx of deaths
