More than doubled cremations, quintupled burials, Green-Wood, New York’s largest cemetery, has reached the limit of its capacity with the influx of deaths due to the coronavirus.
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Cemeteries had begun to prepare for a wave of deaths during the Ebola virus outbreak in 2013-2016, which ultimately largely spared the United States.
The wave of Covid-19 arrived the third week of March in this Brooklyn cemetery, created in 1838 and one of the most beautiful in the city, with its 193 hectares overlooking New York Bay, where the composer Leonard Bernstein rests. or the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“It started with cremations,” explains Eric Barna, vice president of operations, with some days “four or five times” the regular volume.
Currently, the cemetery carries out 130 to 140 cremations per week, against 60 in normal times.
“And it’s not just Green-Wood,” assures Eric Barna, who is part of the Metropolitan Cemetery Association, an organization that brings together the cemeteries of New York, Long Island, to the east, and Westchester County, to the east. North.
“Everyone sees the same numbers,” he says. “I’ve even heard that some funeral directors are looking outside of New York State. (…) We have reached the point where the system cannot manage such a volume in such a short time. ”
Cremation (around $ 370) has the advantage of being much less expensive than burial, in a cemetery that will soon be full and where a place for three coffins sells for $ 19,000.
For ten days, the burials have “really accelerated”, he notes, at 15 or 16 daily, against 2 or 3 usually.
The official death toll from Covid-19 in New York, the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States, already higher than that of some entire countries, is probably “much lower than what is really happening”, no doubt in due to the still limited number of tests, according to Mr. Barna.
The mayor of New York also added 3,700 deaths to this toll on Tuesday evening, to include the number of “probable” deaths from the Covid, bringing the total to more than 10,000 deaths.
The slowdown in the epidemic mentioned in recent days by Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill De Blasio, this official has not yet seen, even if he observes a form of stabilization, at a high level.
The idea of carrying out temporary burials, mentioned last week by an elected representative of Manhattan to face the record number of deaths, he had already heard about, but thinks that “it would be really complicated”.
“The city is not prepared to manage a temporary cemetery,” he said.
For funerals at Green-Wood, employees are equipped with protection and often do not stay when relatives show up, to avoid any risk of contamination, explains Mr. Barna, who pays tribute to the employees.
Even if the cemetery, which has not recorded any contamination among its staff, says it is tolerant of the number of people authorized for burials, at the moment, only presents “most of the time” to close family. And for cremations, there are very often hardly any relatives, he says.
“I think for a lot of people the plan is to deal with the rush, to cremate,” says Barna. “But as things get back to normal, we’ll see a lot of ceremonies. “
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