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.
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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 dead were officially recorded on Monday.
These trucks make it possible to store bodies which 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 space, 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 handle, especially since he himself has 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 in normal times. burials spread “until next month.”
“It’s like September 11, 2001 that would last for days and days,” he says.
The funeral directors are so overloaded that an elected municipal official on Monday mentioned the possibility of carrying out “temporary burials” in a municipal park.
“This will probably be done using a municipal park for burials (yes, you read that right). Trenches will be dug for rows of 10 coffins, ”said this elected representative from northern Manhattan, Mark Levine, on his Twitter account.
