New York City will bury unclaimed bodies on a remote island after 14 days because coronavirus deaths

[mystery-ak]

New York City will bury unclaimed bodies on a remote island after 14 days because coronavirus deaths are overwhelming morgues
Dave Mosher, Business Insider US
April 9, 2020


    The coronavirus pandemic is killing hundreds of people in New York City each day.

    To accommodate the dead before families claim them, the city’s medical examiner expanded temporary refrigerated storage to hold 3,600 decedents, up from the usual 900.

    However, a policy change posted to the medical examiner’s website suggests that room is running out: Bodies that families don’t claim within 14 days of death will be catalogued and interred in a mass grave site on a Bronx island.

    Funeral directors said other policies described by the medical examiner during a conference call on Tuesday could make it even harder to serve families.

    Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

As coronavirus infections peak in New York City, its morgues are quickly running out of room, exceeding their already vastly expanded capacity.

The city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) quietly posted a significant but subtle policy change to its website: Instead of holding some bodies in refrigerated city storage for 30 days until they are claimed by families, the city will now hold them for less than half that time.

On Thursday, OCME’s site said decedents who are not claimed by a funeral home within two weeks would be sent to the Bronx’s Hart Island, where a graveyard called City Cemetery contains more than 1 million unclaimed bodies – the largest such site in the US.

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https://www.businessinsider.my/nyc-coronavirus-covid-19-hart-island-pottersfield-city-cemetery-burials-2020-4

[Smokin Joe]

Yep. How about that?

Inmates from Rykers in Tyveks do the job.

It's Hart Island, where the City's potters fields have been for 151 years, and where over a million are buried.

All that has changed is the hold time, cut from 30 days because they need the room in the coolers in the morgues.

[Cyber Liberty]

14 days?  Are they waiting for the corpses to be COVID-free?

[Smokin Joe]

14 days?  Are they waiting for the corpses to be COVID-free?

If there isn't the morgue space, what are they to do? Cutting time in half indicates that at least the potters field contingent may have doubled in size. (Last year, that was less than 1500 burials for the year, or on average, about 125 extra corpses a month.) Yes, I am aware that that body is of someone's family member, whether there is a family to claim them or not.

So, not to be crass, (not sure what embalming is required in NY) but document them, bag them, spray the bags, box them up, and bury them. Keep good records.

I'm not  trying to sound cold, here, but the virus will die out in the grave, and there will be records of which corpse went where. (Bodies have been recovered from the potters' field before and re-interred elsewhere when claimed by family.)

[TomSea]

I believe @Fishrrman  posted a similar article.