As morgues overflow, New York struggles with COVID-19 dead
07 April, 2020
Refrigerator trucks parked outside hospital doors, overwhelmed undertakers, and speak about temporary burials found in parks: America's coronavirus epicenter of NY is grappling with how exactly to manage the dead.
As the Big Apple's death toll from COVID-19 soared to 3,485 Monday, images of bodies covered in sheets being transported on stretchers by health workers in protective suits certainly are a common sight outside hospitals.
The trucks are storing bodies that are accumulating prematurely for funeral directors to choose them up directly from hospitals.
On Monday morning hours, AFP saw nine bodies loaded into trucks outside Wyckoff Hospital in Brooklyn.
Some undertakers interviewed by AFP stated these were struggling to manage New York state's coronavirus death toll of more than 500 a day.
Between Friday and Saturday, a high of 630 deaths were recorded.
"The majority of funeral homes don't have refrigeration or [possess] limited refrigeration," said Ken Brewster, owner of Crowe's Funeral Homes on Queens.
"If you don't possess the space... you need those trucks," added Brewster, whose small company offers been bombarded with requests for funeral providers for COVID-19 patients in the last week.
'Like 9/11'
Pat Marmo manages five funeral homes over the city.
He is locating it difficult to cope with the stress generated by influx of bodies, particularly because he himself simply just lost a good cousin and close friend to the pandemic.
"The hospitals are pressing [us]. They need the people picked up [as quickly as feasible] and the funeral homes don't possess the facilities to handle these bodies," he told AFP.
Marmo estimates that his homes are dealing with 3 x extra bodies that normal and that burials can last well into the following month.
"It's almost like 9/11, going on for times and days and times," he said, referring to the worst type of terror strikes on US soil back on Sept. 11, 2001.
Undertakers are thus overcrowded that a metropolis official raised the probability Monday of undertaking short-term burials in a public park.
"Trenches will come to be dug for 10 caskets in a line. It will be carried out in a dignified, orderly and temporary manner. But it will be hard for NYers to take," tweeted Tag Levine, a Manhattan council representative.
The comments caused quite a stir in America's most populous city, which includes recently been transformed by the pandemic, including in Central Park in which a field hospital is tending to virus patients.
Apex of deaths?
The mayor's spokeswoman, Freddi Goldstein, stressed that the location government had not been considering using native parks as cemeteries.
But she added that Hart Island, where around one million New Yorkers are buried in mass graves, can be utilized "for non permanent burials, if the necessity grows."
Mayor Costs de Blasio himself spoke of the possibility of non permanent burials "to tide us over until the end of the crisis.
"We happen to be not at that time," he told reporters, before refusing to give any more details.
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Monday that the number of deaths across NY point out had flattened out since Saturday's high, below 600 a day.
He suggested the express may be in the peak of its pandemic, but extended stay-at-home methods until April 29, telling now was not the time to end social distancing.
Source: www.thejakartapost.com
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