NYC officials give families 30 days to claim bodies of hundreds of COVID-19 victims STILL stored in refrigerated morgues on the Brooklyn waterfront before the city starts to bury them on Hart Island.
750 bodies of New Yorkers who died from COVID-19 last year still held in refrigerated trucks
Last year, when the disease was running rampant in New York City, thousands of victims were placed in temporary storage when the medical and funerary systems were overwhelmed. Approximately 32,800 New Yorkers are recorded as having died of COVID-19 in the city since last March, though this is likely a significant undercount.
Workers move bodies to a refrigerated truck from the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Wednesday, April 29, 2020. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)
Many families were unable to cope financially and emotionally with the burden of putting their relatives to rest, not to speak of the destitute and homeless who were dying in large numbers. News accounts reported cases of funeral homes storing bodies in unrefrigerated trucks in the street.
New York is STILL storing 750 COVID victims bodies in refrigerated trucks on Brooklyn pier one year after the pandemic hit - and some families have ignored calls to claim loved ones remains Brooklyn s 39th Street Pier is storing the bodies of around 750 New York City COVID-19 victims in refrigerated trucks one year after the pandemic hit
The disaster morgue was set up in April 2020 and was supposed to be temporary to help overcrowded funeral homes and morgues
Many families of deceased loved ones have asked that they be buried on the city s mass grave Hart Island, or have stopped contacting officials
How this New York island became a mass grave Vox.com 3 hrs ago Rajaa Elidrissi
This story was produced in collaboration with THE CITY and Columbia Journalism School’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, as part of “
,” THE CITY’s ongoing collaborative project to remember every New Yorker killed by Covid-19. The reporters on this story from THE CITY and Stabile are: Haidee Chu, Jacob Geanous, Téa Kvetenadze, Cassidy Jensen, Josh Merchant, Savannah Tryens-Fernandes, and Megan Zerez.
Hart Island, a small piece of land off the Bronx in New York City, resurfaced in national headlines in April 2020, when New York City became the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US. News footage of the island’s cemetery showed trenches being filled with pine coffins, sending shockwaves around the world. But these mass burials taking place during the pandemic are just the most recent in Hart Island’s long history.
De Blasio Calls for ‘Full Accounting’ of NYC Inmates Who Died of COVID after Testing Positive in Jail
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Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
Mayor Bill de Blasio committed Wednesday to a “full accounting” of people who died of COVID-19 after contracting the virus in city jails.
His pledge followed an investigation by Columbia Journalism School’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and THE CITY that identified three men who contracted the virus in local lockups but did not get counted in the Department of Correction’s official death tally.
Corrections Commissioner Cynthia Brann has highlighted that “only three” people have died in city jails during the pandemic. The new findings bring the death toll to at least six.