In New York City, which consolidates its sad status as the center of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States, the question arises of the fate of the ever-increasing dead. The images have struck people’s minds in recent days: bodies, covered with sheets or tarpaulins, transported by employees in protective suits on stretchers in refrigerated trucks, now ubiquitous around hospitals in the first American metropolis.
The city therefore began burying its dead in large mass graves on Thursday on Hart Island, long dubbed “The island of the dead”. Officially, it is“Temporary burials”, while morgues and funeral directors are overwhelmed. Dozens of bodies of coronavirus victims, unclaimed by their relatives, therefore began to be buried there on Thursday, according to several local media.
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Located northeast of the Bronx, a popular district north of Manhattan, Hart Island has been used as New York’s mass grave since 1869. Over a million people unidentified, unclaimed or for whom relatives could not pay funerals are already buried there. “We will continue to use the island for this purpose during the crisis and it is likely that people who died from Covid-19 who fall within one of these cases will be buried there in the days to come”, said a spokesperson for New York City.
Images filmed this week by drone for the New York Post show dozens of sketchy coffins being buried on Hart Island.
Quoted by several media, a spokesperson for the city’s prison services, which manage the place, said that around 24 people were buried every day currently, against 25 on average per week before the pandemic. On Friday, the mayor of New York implicitly admitted that bodies of people who died from the coronavirus were buried on Hart Island.
New York State remains the most affected by the pandemic in the United States, with 777 new deaths in the last 24 hours and 7,844 deaths in total since the arrival of the coronavirus in the region.
Usually inmates, taken from the famous nearby Rikers Island prison, provide burials. But given the risks of contamination and concerns about the spread of the virus in detention, the task is currently being carried out by employees of a subcontractor, a spokesperson for New York City said.
The prison services have opened a register which lists all the people buried on the island since 1977 and whose identity is known. The management of the island has been regularly criticized, with the prison services accused of not maintaining the site properly. In early 2018, several local media had shown images of bones scattered on the shores of the island, from skeletons discovered by erosion. At the end of 2019, the city council voted to transfer the management of Hart Island to the city’s parks and gardens service, scheduled for 2021. The change of manager also aims to make the site more accessible to relatives of people buried on the island.
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