Temporary burial: Coronavirus victims in New York may be buried in parks and on Hart Island

Some coronavirus victims may be temporarily buried in a special cemetery on Hart Island or even in public parks if New York morgues are crowded from a large number of dead. This was reported on April 6 by officials, writes New York Post.

They thought about such a measure, since the number of deaths in the city increased to 2, and the number of patients reached 738. This represents more than half of the 68 deaths and 776 cases of infection in the entire state of New York.

“We may well be dealing with temporary graves,” Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed at a press briefing. "Obviously this will be the place we have used historically, Hart Island."

Located in the Long Island Strait off the southeast coast of the Bronx, the Desert Spit is the country's largest public cemetery with a dismal history. It housed a prison camp during the Civil War, a colony for tuberculosis patients, and in the 1980s it became a place of residence for thousands of HIV / AIDS victims who were abandoned by families or were unable to receive proper burials.

De Blasio, who did not want to publicly discuss how New York would deal with the overwhelming majority of coronavirus victims, faced terrible reality after city councilor Mark Levin raised the question of an even more terrible opportunity for the city. In particular, Levin said that New York will soon begin to use its city parks for burial.

“It will be done with dignity, orderly and temporarily. But it will be hard for New Yorkers, ”he wrote on Twitter.

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Levin also clarified that the plan to turn the parks into makeshift cemeteries is a "contingency." The mayor's office said that this is not happening yet.

“We are not currently planning to use the local parks as a burial place,” City Hall spokesman Freddie Goldstein said on Twitter. "We are investigating the possibility of using Hart Island for temporary burials if the need for this increases."

State Governor Andrew Cuomo voiced this version again on Monday, April 6, after a record number of deaths was recorded in the region on Saturday, 630. On Sunday, the death toll from COVID-19 was 594, and on Monday it actually remained in place - 599 .