For more than a century, New York City has buried stillborn babies and dead without family or money on Hart Island, a 53-hectare island off the Bronx district (more about Hart Island you can read here).
Current aerial photographs of Hart Island show workers in protective clothing climbing into a large excavated pit with several coffins.
In the face of the acute crisis, the city of New York has decided to bury unknown dead on Hart Island after 14 days at the latest. Usually up to 25 deceased are brought to the island once a week. They come here almost every day, five times a week.
Drone shots from mass grave near New York
Different gravediggers than usual
Prisoners from the nearby Rikers Island prison are usually used as gravediggers, but in the current situation private companies have been commissioned to do so.
An official confirmation is pending, but it can be assumed that the newly excavated grave field on Hart Island is intended for corona victims, writes BBC. At the beginning of the week, the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, said that “temporary burials” would be necessary until the crisis was over.
The state of New York yesterday reported a 10,000 case increase in infections to 159,937 cases and 7,000 deaths.
New corona deaths were registered in the United States on Thursday 1783. The number of fatalities rose to a total of around 16,500, according to data from the American Johns Hopkins University. According to this, around 462,000 infections have already been detected in the USA.
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