Bodies of Hundreds of COVID-19 Victims Stored in Brooklyn Morgue Trucks Since Spring

The bodies of about 650 New Yorkers killed during the spring COVID surge-19 are still kept in freezers on the Brooklyn waterfront. About why it is not always possible to find the relatives of the victims, and for what reason some refuse to take the bodies of loved ones, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Many bodies of people whose relatives cannot be found, or those whose loved ones cannot afford to organize a funeral, are still stored in trucks on the Brooklyn waterfront. This was reported by the Office of Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York.

We are talking about a figure of about 650 bodies. They are stored in a truck morgue set up in April on a pier in Sunset Park.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, most, if not all, of the deceased would have been buried within weeks in an indigent grave on Hart Island, located in Long Island Sound near the Bronx.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio promised in April that mass graves would not take place after reports that New York was considering using temporary graves on Hart Island.

Officials at the senior forensic examiner's office said they were having trouble finding relatives of about 230 of the dead. In other cases, relatives of the deceased reported that they did not have the ability to arrange burial for financial reasons.

In May, New York City increased funeral aid from $ 900 to $ 1700. According to the New York State Funeral Directors Association, this is still not enough, as the average cost of organizing a funeral in New York is about $ 9. And if we are talking about cremation, then the amount is about $ 6500.

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Every family has the right to claim free burial on Hart Island. Some families are struggling to decide what to do, says Dina Maniotis, executive deputy commissioner of the chief medical examiner's office who oversaw the unit's pandemic response. “It's very traumatic,” said Maniotis. - We work with them (relatives of the victims - Ed.) As gently as we can, and we persuade them to decide what they will do. Many of them will decide they want to bury their loved ones on Hart Island, and that's okay. "

The office of the chief medical examiner was not created to combat the global pandemic, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of New Yorkers in just a few months. Its forensic department has 15 staff members who are tasked with identifying the bodies. Another seven people are responsible for contact with the next of kin.

According to Aden Naka, deputy director of the forensic science department, this was originally supposed to be about 20 deaths a day. However, at the peak of the pandemic, it faced 200 new cases per day.

In addition, relatives of the missing people called the office to find out if their loved ones were registered there, learned how to request a death certificate, identify the body and organize a funeral.

Officials from the chief medical examiner's office said the city's health department had rerouted more than 100 staff from other areas to answer those calls, which rose to 1000 a day, up from the usual 30 or 40 calls.

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Aden Naka said many of the callers are struggling to cope with their problems. Some of them are recovering from the virus themselves, others have lost their jobs due to the pandemic. For some of them, several family members have already died from COVID-19.

Meanwhile, the Bureau has accumulated a large number of pending cases. This led to the fact that some families learned about the death of a loved one several weeks or even months after he died.

Lea-Anne Carafa from Westchester received such a call on 28 July. The chief medical examiner said her husband, Frank Joseph Carafa, whom she had separated from, had died and was found in bed almost three months earlier, on May 6.

Mr. Carafa died of cardiovascular disease in a room he recently rented in Manhattan. The death certificate of a 54-year-old man does not mention the coronavirus as a contributing factor to his death. “It is so painful to know that he passed away in the medical examiner's office, and his family remained in the dark all this time,” Karafa said. She added that she and her 22-year-old son wondered why Mr. Karafa was not answering their messages and phone calls. They assumed he was busy arranging a new home and delivering packages. Ms Karafa also thought that her ex-husband had problems with his mobile phone and that he would soon contact them himself. “His family loved him very much, even if we didn't talk every day,” she said.

A spokeswoman for the Office of Senior Medical Examiner noted that the office has dealt with an unprecedented number of deaths in the midst of the pandemic and that the first successful family contact is often the result of many other calls and investigations.

Typically, the office of the chief medical examiner identifies the body by a family member or by paperwork, fingerprints, medical and dental records, or DNA. In other cases, investigators turn to city authorities or the police to check documents.

Aden Naka said that on a number of occasions during the pandemic, investigators realized that immediate family members were not answering phone calls because they too had died.

Dina Maniotis noted that the city is slowly reducing the number of bodies in storage. Between mid-September and mid-November, the number of bodies dropped from 698 to 650.

A spokeswoman for the office of the chief medical examiner said the temporary morgue will operate at least until the pandemic is over.