Published on : 11/05/2021 – 06:18
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They will sometimes have spent more than twelve months in these makeshift morgues, in one of the richest cities in the world. The services of the New York medical examiner have just admitted that 750 dead linked to the Covid-19 pandemic were still stored in refrigerated trucks.
From our correspondent in New York, Carrie Nooten
The image, taken from a helicopter, is striking: more than 40 refrigerated trailers on the quay of a Brooklyn port area, which are said to contain 750 bodies of victims of the Covid-19.
This more secret in the management of the pandemic in New York was revealed a few days ago during a City Council. And he outraged Marc Gjonaji, one of the advisers, who does not hesitate to compare their treatment to furniture in a warehouse, or unclaimed luggage to found objects.
Temporary mortuary
These trucks had served as temporary morgues at the height of the pandemic a year ago. But, as Dina Maniotis of the New York Medical Examiner’s Office explains, the city wanted to give families time to organize funerals for their loved ones, when funerals have long been complicated to organize.
City councilors, like Marc Gjonaji, are pleading to help these families arrange burials on Hart Island, in the Long Island Strait. For more than a century, this is where the indigent and anonymous of New York have been buried, in mass graves but also in individual graves.
Dignity and respect
He believes that the city owes it to these dead, to bury them with dignity and respect. Hart Island is scheduled to reopen to the public this weekend. This could convince families to finally bury their loved ones there.
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