The number dead bodies taken to Hart Island is now 10 times the quantity of remains usually brought to the site. Dubbed as New York's "Isle of Dead," the island has become the receiving end of the casualties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to The Sun, the island landscapers wearing hazmat suits, bury pine coffins three meters deep in mass graves that take up to a trench.
The Hart Island Project's President Melinda Hunt shared catalogs of each known victim buried there and she pointed out that she had never seen anything like this and for her, it is a massacre.
According to a private funeral director, bodies which remain unclaimed within 15 days are qualified to be buried on Hart Island. The said remains will also be put inside coffins bearing their names and grave numbers. However, unidentified bodies will have the word "unknown" written on coffin lids.
The remains are unembalmed and buried only labeled with medical conditions they had experienced when they died. However, in order to track down each body, a GPS device is placed at the end of the plot making sure that they can locate each body easily when there is a need.
Hart Island already served for about 151 years as a resting place for victims of war and pandemic from the 1860s civil War to Spanish flu in 1918 and the AIDS epidemic about 40 years ago.
Hunt: 'It's like a massacre'
Instead of one burial shift on a weekly basis, now there are five as undertakers have been overwhelmed in the death toll of New York wherein 15,300 have died. Hospitals in the city are already utilizing refrigerated trucks to store the corpse of the coronavirus victims.
The Hart Island Project president anticipated that there will be a backlog of up to five years for coronavirus funerals as she shared that the city is not mishandling these bodies. She added that it is actually safer to be in one of these common graves, in terms of knowing where the body is than if you agree to an individual burial.
She also emphasized that what they are doing in the Hart Island Project is systematic, as it is not designed as a way of dumping bodies. It designed as a way of being able to know where everybody is and move them later on when there is progress or a request.
Due to the current pandemic, restrictions were lifted as they allowed crematoriums to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week to cater to the enormous death toll. However, despite the continuous operation, there is still a need to wait for two weeks.
In Brooklyn's De Riso Funeral Home, due to the overflowing dead bodies, they are forced to make their reception room as extra storage even without refrigeration. With bodies in sealed bags lying in cardboard boxes, double-stacked on every furniture in the room, it releases a putrid smell into the room.
Even cremated remains must be buried in a minimum amount of $1,500-1,600 range, leaving some jobless New Yorkers or most of the Americans unable to afford a proper send-off for their loved ones.
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