The city of New York buried almost 900 people in its mass grave on Hart Island, The Bronx, during the coronavirus pandemic and at its worst, in early April, saw the usual rhythm of burials multiply due to saturation of the funeral homes and local morgues, local media reported this Saturday.
From March 9 to yesterday, a total of 894 people were buried on Hart Island, the largest municipal cemetery in the United States, managed by the Department of Corrections and that for 150 years has received the bodies that no one claims in the Big Apple or of those who cannot afford a decent burial.
This 530,000 square meter piece of land located on an island received about 1,100 burials last year, which is about twenty a week, while only on April 6, during the peak of Covid-19, was buried 138 people, according to the NY Post newspaper, cited by the EFE news agency.
That same week the city stopped commissioning the burials of inmates at the Hart Island prison for coronavirus containment issues and instead hired a company, at a cost of about $ 320,000 until May 22, according to with figures from the mayor’s office.
Images of the mass grave with the stacked coffins, taken from the air, caused consternation among New Yorkers, and the mayor, Bill de Blasio, assured that the idea was that the burials were temporary and the relatives who claimed the bodies could in the future hold a private funeral.
New York remains the most affected state in the United States by the coronavirus with 391,923 confirmed cases and 31,342 deaths, but now it has the lowest rate of transmission of the virus in the country and continues to progress in its indicators while the western and southern regions worsen, with daily case records.
At the peak of the pandemic, in April, New York hospitals, morgues and funeral homes were in many cases forced to use refrigerated trucks to keep bodies while families could bury their loved ones.
There was the case of a Brooklyn funeral home that piled dozens of bodies in moving trucks that did not have a refrigeration system, which led to the withdrawal of their license and the management of the bodies by local authorities.
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