Full morgues leave New York City stretched
New York City’s morgues are filling up with thousands of bodies due to the coronavirus outbreak, forcing officials to seek alternative places for them.
New York state, which has been the hardest hit by COVID-19 in the United States, reported its highest number of virus-related deaths in a single day on Wednesday, with Governor Andrew Cuomo announcing that a further 779 people had died.
That brought the virus death toll to 6,268 in the state, which Cuomo noted was more than twice as many people as the state had lost in the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“It’s obviously been a bit overwhelming in the hardest areas, which are really the Queens and Brooklyn areas — where most of the deaths are occurring,” said Michael Lanotte, executive director and CEO of the New York State Funeral Directors Association.
The organization, based in Albany, has 900 members and represents more than 3,000 funeral directors.
Lanotte added: “They’ve been working very long hours. On average I’ve heard back from them it’s 7 am until 1 am, phones are ringing from families in need on a regular basis. Some (businesses) have already gotten close to their normal year’s worth of (funerals) they would serve in the last three weeks.”
Around the city, there are 130 refrigerated trucks being used to store bodies. They are located mainly outside hospitals, and often parked along sidewalks near people’s apartments.
The loading of corpses by forklift trucks has been observed at Brooklyn Hospital Center. A makeshift morgue has been built outside Bellevue Hospital and other hospitals, like Lenox Hill in Manhattan.
Before the outbreak, it was typical for 20 to 25 people a day to die in New York City. Now it’s around 240.
New York City Councilman Mark Levine sparked outrage this week after he said the city’s parks could be temporarily used to bury people in “a dignified, orderly and temporary manner”.
He quickly backtracked on the proposal, tweeting: “I have spoken to many folks in City gov’t today, and received unequivocal assurance that there will be ‘no’ burials in NYC Parks. All have stated clearly that if temporary interment should be needed it will be done on Hart Island.”
Refrigerated storage
On Tuesday, the city’s Chief Medical Examiner Office posted on its website that it would no longer hold bodies in refrigerated storage for 30 days until they are claimed. Instead, they will hold them for just six days.
Those not claimed by a funeral home will be sent to Potter’s Field, a cemetery on Hart Island, off the coast in the Bronx.
For more than 100 years the milelong cemetery has been where at least 1 million unclaimed bodies, poor New Yorkers and those with AIDS have been buried. It was first used to bury Union soldiers from the Civil War.
It has been run for 150 years by the Department of Corrections and has inmates from Rikers Island jail to dig graves. In March, the city raised how much it paid inmates to put caskets in graves, from $1.50 an hour to $6, as it wanted to increase the pool of prisoners available to help operations, officials said.
Deaths from COVID-19 have completely overwhelmed the city’s crematoriums, and regulators are now allowing them to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until June.
Crematory chambers are also under stress due to frequent use. They are usually heated between 1,400 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, but are not able to undergo an idle period in between use because of the pandemic, said Richard Moylan, the president of Green-Wood Cemetery.
Some (businesses) have already gotten close to their normal year’s worth of (funerals) they would serve in the last three weeks.” Michael Lanotte, executive director and CEO of the New York State Funeral Directors Association