NYC medical staff wait until nightfall to bring out the dead as city hospitals report bodies flowing through like a ‘conveyor belt’ while 130 MORE mobile morgues are on their way with experts predicting citywide death toll to soar past 16,000
Funeral directors are finding themselves stuck in the middle of a system where hospitals are overrun with more fatalities and cemeteries and crematoriums are booked up for at least a week
Families who have lost loved ones to the killer disease have been left heartbroken as the stay-at-home order means they cannot hold public funerals
Pat Marmo, owner of Daniel J. Schaefer funeral home, said he had 185 bodies in his morgue Thursday
‘They’re not bodies. They’re people,’ said Marmo as he has no choice but to beg hospitals to hold onto bodies
Images of medical staff bringing out the dead from hard-hit Mount Sinai Hospital under the cover of darkness have surfaced overnight
One doctor in Brooklyn said the dead are flowing through hospitals ‘like a conveyor belt’
Crematories and cemeteries have also been operating less due to the city’s lockdown and social distancing rules, leaving bodies backed up
Refrigerated lorries are acting as makeshift morgues outside hospitals
130 more mobile morgues are on their way to NYC to plug the gap and the city’s medical examiner’s office has taken control of the disposal of bodies
New estimates say the death toll in the Big Apple alone could surpass 16,000
By RACHEL SHARP
DAILYMAIL.COM
3 April 2020
Medical staff waited until nightfall yesterday to wheel out the dead to avoid bumping in to passersby on the streets of New York after city hospitals reported bodies flowing through them ‘like a conveyor belt’.
As the number of dead rises, funeral homes have reported becoming ‘overwhelmed’ with the grim death tally and 130 more mobile morgues are now on their way to store the overflowing fatal victims of the coronavirus crisis.
New estimates predict the death toll in the Big Apple alone could surpass 16,000, leaving the city’s already-struggling funeral homes bursting at the seams with bodies.
Using the cover of darkness to hide the grim reality of the death tally from people passing the sidewalk outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, medical workers were pictured carrying out four corpses in an hour to be loaded on to a refrigerated morgue.
The staff, clad in partial PPE, wheeled the dead out in black body bags tied to stretchers down a ramp into the parking lot.
From there, they moved the trolley to the sidewalk, where a refrigerated temporary morgue truck was waiting to ferry them away.
New York state continues to be the US epicenter of the pandemic with 92,743 infections and 2,468 deaths as of Thursday night. New York City accounts for most of the fatalities, with a death toll of 1,562.
While the healthcare system buckles under the strain, the disposal of bodies is fast becoming the latest crisis with bottlenecks emerging at every step from the hospitals to funeral homes to crematories and cemeteries.
Funeral directors are finding themselves stuck in the middle of a system where hospitals are overrun with more fatalities and cemeteries and crematoriums are booked up for at least a week.
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