New York City hospitals are running out of room in their morgues, but the flow of coronavirus bodies is just starting to ramp up

https://news.yahoo.com/york-city-hospitals-running-room-213600665.html

Dave Mosher
,Business Insider•March 25, 2020

New York City is running out of room to store the bodies of those who've died from COVID-19, a respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus that emerged less than 3 months ago.

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As increasing numbers of people die from the illness, relatively small hospital morgues around the area are filling up. That's according to a licensed funeral director, embalmer, and body removal expert who works for a company handling transport of most COVID-19 bodies in the city.

"On Sunday the morgues already seemed full," said the mortuary professional, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of their work, adding that there are typically only one or two corpses on Sundays. (Business Insider confirmed the person's identity.)

"You have to wait for the tests to come back before making the removal for our safety," they said, and due to a sometimes days-long lag in that testing "the death toll from COVID currently is much higher than it is in the news."

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A spokesperson for FEMA independently confirmed the information with Business Insider.

"FEMA's National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) has received requests for HHS Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams (DMORT) from the States of Hawaii, New York, and North Carolina," the spokesperson said in an email. "These requests are currently in the review and approval process."

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