Coronavirus: In New York, bodies will soon have to be buried in parks

A row of refrigerated trucks outside a New York hospital. Image: EPA

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At least that’s what Mark Levine says. The chairman of the New York City Council Health Committee raised the alarm in a series of tweets. He warns the population that not only the hospitals, but also the morgues, funeral homes and cemeteries are at the attack.

If the number of deaths does not fall very soon, “temporary burials” will have to be introduced. To do this, graves would have to be dug in a park in New York City.

Mark Levine’s statement illustrates the current situation in New York very well, so we decided to translate it into full text. You can find the original by clicking on the tweet.

New York City’s health care system is being stretched to the limit. And sadly, the system for dealing with our dead has now also reached its limits. This system also needs more resources.

All of this has a major impact on grieving families. And on all of us.

NYC’s “municipal morgue” is the Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), which fortunately is one of the best in the world.

But now you have the equivalent of an ongoing September 11th. So are the morgues, funeral homes and cemeteries.

A typical hospital morgue has a capacity of 15 deceased. They are all full now. That’s why 80 refrigerated trailers were sent to hospitals across the city. Each trailer can hold 100 bodies. But even the trailers are now mostly full. Some hospitals have had to add a second or even a third trailer.

Grieving families report that they called up to half a dozen funeral directors and found none to care for the deceased loved ones.

Cemeteries are no longer able to cope with the number of burial requests and therefore reject most of them.

It is not just the hospital deaths that are on the rise. On the average day before this crisis, there were 20 to 25 deaths in NYC that took place within the home. Now, in the midst of this pandemic, that number is around 200-215. Every day.

At the beginning of this crisis, we were able to take swabs from people who had died at home and thus received a coronavirus result. But those days are long gone. We just don’t have the testing capacity to handle the immense numbers of dying people who perish at home.

Now only the few will have a test confirmation in front her death, identified on her death certificate as a victim of the coronavirus. This almost certainly means that we are underestimating the total number of victims of this pandemic.

And yet the number of corpses continues to grow. The freezers in the OCME facilities in Manhattan and Brooklyn will soon be full. And then what?

Soon we will start with “temporary funerals”. For that we’re going to need a funeral park in New York (yes, you read that right). Trenches are dug for 10 coffins in a row.

This will be done in a dignified, orderly, and temporary manner. But it will be hard to take for New Yorkers.

The aim is to avoid scenes like in Italy, where the military was forced to pick up bodies from churches and even from the streets. To achieve this goal, the OCME will need a lot more staff.

Fortunately, the New York Department of Defense and National Guard have already dispatched teams, and volunteer medical assessors have come from across the country. But we will need a lot more help if we are to avoid disaster.

As New York City continues to seek help from the government, we don’t just have to call in doctors and nurses and lung specialists. We also need morgue staff. It’s difficult to talk about, and maybe difficult to ask. But we don’t have a choice. There is too much at stake.

To sum up: nothing is more important in this crisis than saving the living. But we have to face the terrible reality that we need more resources to care for our dead as well. Otherwise, the pain of this crisis will be many times worse.