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

https://news.yahoo.com/york-city-bury-bodies-remote-182713446.html

Dave Mosher
,Business Insider•April 9, 2020


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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Those who are interred can either be removed by family members or left at rest for no cost, the site added.

An average of 245 people have died each day within the city's five boroughs from COVID-19, or about one person every six minutes. The number is likely even higher, though, since the official count does not include "probable" deaths from the pandemic; as many as 200 more per day may be dying from the coronavirus, according to Gothamist.

"I don't know how many more bodies I can take," Patrick Marmo, a funeral-home operator based in Brooklyn, previously told Business Insider. "No one in the New York City area possibly has enough equipment to care for human remains of this magnitude."

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