New York City has called in reinforcements to bury bodies in mass graves in Hart Island near the Bronx, as the death toll from Covid-19 has shattered all records in recent days, reports Reuters .
This drone footage captures NYC workers burying bodies in a mass grave on Hart Island, just off the coast of the Bronx. For over a century, the island has served as a potter's field for deceased with no known next of kin or families unable to pay for funerals. pic.twitter.com/wBVIGlX6aK
- NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 9, 2020These mass graves, where nearly one million New Yorkers, often poor or destitute, already rest, could be used for "temporary burials", if "needs increased," a spokeswoman for the city said earlier this week. 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 today reaches 25 bodies buried ... per day, said Thursday to Reuters Jason Kersten, a spokesman for the prison administration, who oversees these burials, carried out by detainees.
The names inscribed on the coffins
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 one day be exhumed. Then the coffins are then buried in long, narrow trenches. "Two new trenches have been dug if necessary," Jason Kersten told the news agency, adding that contract workers had been hired to deal with it.
In New York City, which confirms its sad status as the center of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States, the question is now being asked of the fate reserved for the ever-increasing number of dead. Because with the increase in deaths in New York State - where there have been regularly at least 500 new deaths per day for a week - several funeral directors interviewed said they were "overwhelmed".
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"Most funeral homes have limited refrigeration capacity," Ken Brewster, owner of a small funeral home business in Queens, told AFP on Monday asking for burial requests from Covid- 19. "If you don't have room, you need these trucks." The influx is all the stronger since some houses have decided not to take any deceased person from the disease, which is "their right," he said.
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The funeral directors are so overcrowded that an elected municipal official spoke on Monday of the possibility of carrying out “temporary burials” in a municipal park. In a city already transformed by the pandemic, with tents for the sick planted in Central Park, this declaration immediately struck the spirits. But the town hall quickly qualified the point. "We currently have no plans to use parks as cemeteries," said spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein.
Towards "temporary burials"?
However, she acknowledged 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 said during a press point.
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New York, the densest city in the United States with already more than 72,000 people infected, hopes in fact not to get there. Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday that the statewide death toll had stabilized since Saturday, staying below 600 a day. He nevertheless ordered the extension of the containment measures until April 29, stressing that it was important not to be “too confident” and to abandon social distancing efforts too soon.
