In New York City, which consolidates its sad status as the center of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States, the question now arises of the fate of the increasingly numerous dead. To the point that the possibility of having to proceed soon to “temporary burials” in a park, to relieve overwhelmed funeral directors, has even been raised.
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 the hospitals of the first American metropolis, where near 3,500 deaths were officially recorded on Monday.
These trucks are used to store bodies that accumulate too quickly for the funeral directors to come and collect them directly from the hospital. On Monday morning alone, in less than an hour, AFP saw nine bodies loaded into trucks parked outside Wyckoff Hospital in Brooklyn.
Because with the increase in the death toll in New York State – where there have been regularly at least 500 new deaths per day for a week – several funeral directors interviewed by AFP said they were “overwhelmed” .
“Most funeral homes have limited refrigeration capacity,” said Ken Brewster, owner of a small funeral director in the Queens neighborhood, beset with requests for funerals from Covid-19 patients for a week.
“If you don’t have the room, you need these trucks.”
The influx is all the stronger as some houses have decided not to take any person who has died of the disease, which is “their right”, he says.
For Pat Marmo, who runs five funeral homes across the city, the stress of this influx of the dead is hard to deal with, especially since he just lost a cousin and a loved one in the city. epidemic.
“The hospitals push us to come and collect the bodies, but we do not have the premises to manage (them)”, he explains, stressing that we currently have “three times more” deaths than normal times and a schedule burials spread “until next month.
“It’s like September 11, 2001 that would last for days and days,” he says.
– “If the need increases …” –
The funeral directors are so overloaded that an elected municipal official spoke on Monday of the possibility of carrying out “temporary burials” in a municipal park.
“This will probably be done by using a municipal park for burials (yes, you read that correctly). Trenches will be dug for rows of 10 coffins,” said this elected official from north Manhattan, Mark Levine, on his Twitter account .
In a city already transformed by the pandemic, with tents for the sick pitched in Central Park, this statement immediately struck people’s minds.
But the town hall quickly qualified the point. “We do not currently plan to use parks as cemeteries,” spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein said.
She nevertheless admitted that the city was considering using the island of Hart Island, near the Bronx district, where already lie in mass graves nearly a million New Yorkers, often poor or destitute, for “burials. temporary “,” if the need increases “.
Deaths aren’t just on the rise in hospitals, says Levine. Before the pandemic, 20 to 25 people died in their homes in New York on a daily basis. Now it’s 200 to 215, he said, although it is often not possible to posthumously verify whether they have died from the virus.
Mayor Bill de Blasio himself spoke on Monday of the possibility of “temporary burials” to “hold out until the end of the crisis”.
“We are not there, I will not go into details,” he qualified during a press briefing.
New York, the densest city in the United States with already more than 72,000 infected people, hopes not to come to this.
Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday that the statewide death toll has stabilized since Saturday, to remain below 600 per day.
He nevertheless ordered the extension of the containment measures until April 29, stressing that it was important not to be “too confident” and abandon too soon social distancing efforts.
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