- Hundreds of those killed by coronavirus were buried in a mass grave in New York.
- Inhabitants of New York were shocked after images of the coronavirus deaths piled up in a mass grave were revealed.
- The Mayor of New York City admitted the burials of coronavirus victims in the mass grave, but said they were temporary.
New York City has buried nearly 900 people in its Hart Island mass grave (The Bronx) during the pandemic of the coronavirus and, in its worst moments, in early April, saw the usual rhythm of burials multiplied by the saturation of funeral homes and local morgues, local media reported this Saturday.
From March 9 to this Friday, a total of 894 people have been buried in Hart Island, the largest municipal cemetery in the United States, managed by the Department of Corrections and that for 150 years has received the bodies that nobody claims in the Great Apple or those who can not afford a decent burial, reported the news agency Eph.
This 530,000-square-meter piece of land located on an island hosted some 1,100 burials last year, which is about twenty a week, while just last week on April 6, during the peak of the coronavirus, 138 were buried people, according to the NY Post.
That same week, the city stopped commissioning the inmates of the prison that Hart Island manages for reasons of containment of the coronavirus and instead hired a company, at a cost of about $ 320,000 until May 22, according to quoted figures from the Mayor’s Office.
Images of the mass grave with the coffins stacked, taken from the air, caused consternation in New York and the mayor, Bill de Blasio, assured that the idea was that the burials were temporary and the relatives who claimed the bodies could in the future celebrate a private burial.
New York remains the state hardest hit by the coronavirus in the United States with 391,923 confirmed cases and 31,342 deaths, but now it has the lowest rate of transmission of the virus in the country and continues to progress in its indicators while the western and southern regions get worse, with daily case records.
At the peak of the pandemic, in April, New York hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes were in many cases forced to use refrigerated trucks to keep bodies waiting for families to bury loved ones.
There was the case of a Brooklyn funeral home that heaped dozens of bodies in moving trucks that did not have a refrigeration system, leading to the withdrawal of their license and the management of the bodies by local authorities.
The US, with more than 2.5 million infected, continues to be hit by a pandemic
The United States continues to lead the number of COVID-19 infections worldwide, closing this Saturday with more than 2.5 million cases and 125,480 deaths, according to the independent count by Johns Hopkins University.
The balance at 20:00 local time (00:00 GMT on Sunday) revealed that 43,536 people contracted the disease in the last 24 hours, totaling 2,505,593 positive cases in the country.
During the day, 502 new deaths were recorded, according to the calculation.
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