New York City officials are starting to lay contingency plans if deaths from the coronavirus outbreak begin to overwhelm the capacity of morgues: temporarily burying the dead on public land.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday that the city would consider temporary burials if the deaths from the coronavirus outbreak exceed the space available in city and hospital morgues, but it had not reached that point.
— The New York Times
A report from The New York Times highlights a recently proposed contingency plan that could utilize existing public cemetery facilities on Hart Island in The Bronx as temporary burial sites to help meet the city’s growing need for morgue and funerary spaces in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hart Island is currently used as a cemetery for the remains of people who die but go unclaimed in the city.
Last week, Archinect reported that the city’s existing morgue facilities were being supplemented by a fleet of refrigerated trucks. Those resources, as well as other temporary morgue arrangements, are continuing to fill up as the city’s death rate from COVID-19 grows.
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