The refrigerated trucks come from all parts of the city. They rumble over a bridge to an island off the coast of the Bronx. At the other end there is a ferry that will ship you to another, smaller island, dreary and uninhabited. In the distance you can see the Manhattan skyline.
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A drone video reveals what happens next: workers in overalls, face masks and gloves set about unloading the cargo – simple pine coffins, one like the other. A forklift takes them to a ditch and lowers them one by one. The workers cover them with chipboard and shovel earth on them until the coffins are gone.
This is how they are buried anonymously, the poorest corona dead in New York City. If no one knows the dead or if the bereaved cannot afford a funeral, then the city takes care of the last rest – on Hart Island, America’s largest poor cemetery.
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“There is no shame in such burials,” says documentarist Melinda Hunt to SPIEGEL. “They don’t mean you were unloved.”
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