Coronavirus: New York experiences drama with crowded morgues and field hospitals | world

“The number of burial requests and cremation have probably gone up 300%,” says Tassi, the Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester, just a few miles north of Manhattan.

Currently, up to 20 bodies pass through this crematorium in 16 hours, seven days a week. But still, operating at full capacity, the schedule is complete by the end of next week.

History repeats itself in other parts of New York, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, the country with the most confirmed cases of covid-19 in the world.

“Most cemeteries don’t have refrigeration units to deal with a pandemic. Therefore, the biggest problem now is that we don’t have refrigerated storage to keep bodies here for long periods,” says Tassi, who chairs the Association of State cemeteries. New York and has worked in the industry for 23 years.

Funeral homes are also overloaded, and authorities have sent dozens of mobile morgues or refrigerated trucks to hospitals.

The goal is to prevent corpses from accumulating without a place to receive them, as happened in other countries affected by the fight against the virus.

“I have never seen anything like this in my life, so many people dying in such a short time,” Tassi told BBC News Mundo, the Spanish BBC service. “Even on September 11 we did not have the number of bodies we have now with the pandemic,” he says, referring to the 2001 attacks on the city.

In fact, in the attacks that the United States considered the greatest terrorist act in its history, almost 3,000 people died in New York.

This figure was officially approved this week by the coronavirus. In New York City, more than 3,200 people have died, while across the state this number has reached 5,489.

The pandemic has transformed New York: The city has never been so calm and quiet for so long, to the point where you can cross the avenues without waiting for the traffic lights to turn green or hear the sound of a coin falling on the sidewalk. deserted.

The silence is only broken when an ambulance passes with the siren on.

This also happens at 7 pm, every day, when New Yorkers applaud health professionals fighting the pandemic from the windows. Right now, the city seems to regain its strong spirit for a few minutes.

Local authorities have extended the closure of schools and businesses that do not fall into the category of essential services, as well as the ban on meetings until April 29: fines for criminals can reach $ 1,000.

Although the police do not ostensibly control the movement of people, the 8.6 million New Yorkers have largely responded to the request that they remain in their homes as long as possible.

A field hospital set up in Central Park by a religious humanitarian organization receives dozens of covid-19 patients daily, and seeing those white tents on the lawn of this wealthy city can cause a sense of fear and estrangement.

The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan is also being converted into a hospital. It is considered the largest Gothic church in the world.

And the military transformed the Javits Convention Center, on the same island, into another temporary hospital with 2,500 beds available.

The goal is to increase healthcare capacity, which is at the limit in a state with more than 138,800 confirmed cases of coronavirus and more than 17,400 people hospitalized due to the disease.

This week, President Donald Trump authorized a military hospital ship initiating patients receiving covid-19 in Manhattan.

However, in another sign that the disease is spreading uncontrollably, the United States Navy said Tuesday that a crew member of the hospital ship USNS Comfort was infected with the coronavirus – other servers were preemptively isolated .

Despite the record 731 deaths in New York State between Monday and Tuesday, Governor Andrew Cuomo said hospitalizations and the passage of patients in intensive care decreased.

Cuomo indicated that, thanks to social isolation measures, New York may be reaching a downward trend in its hospitalization curve.

However, it is still too early to know what will happen.

“We are not yet doing enough to know how many people are infected,” says Theodora Hatziioannou, an associate professor of virology at Rockefeller University in Manhattan.

“Therefore, the prediction that this week’s peak is that, say what is going to happen or the next is impossible at the moment,” Hatziioannou told BBC World.

‘Our lives are going to change’

On the other hand, warnings have also emerged that the number of deaths from coronavirus in New York may be higher than official data.

Councilman Mark Levine, chairman of the city’s health commission, said deaths in homes increased 10-fold compared to the period before the pandemic: Today, they are between 200 and 215 a day.

“I’m sure almost all of this increase is people with coronaviruses. But not everyone is counted that way,” he wrote on Twitter.

Levine also caused a stir this week when he claimed that the city could soon begin burying the dead provisionally in the parks, though he later clarified that this is a contingency plan that can be scrapped if the number of deaths was lowered enough.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted Monday that the temporary burial plan could be implemented, but denied it would take place in the parks. And her spokesperson indicated that burials could take place on Hart Island in the Bronx.

The truth is that the virus traces a new, gloomy landscape in this opulent city, but already marked by moments of great pain.

“September 11 was a terrorist act and that scares us, they consume every day, whether at work or at home with our families: it seems that they talk to us all the time, we talk about it all the time,” reflects Phil Suarez , a paramedic who collaborated in efforts to rescue victims of the attacks in 2001.

Suarez also treated injured people in Iraq in 2017 and worked in disasters, but says the coronavirus has made him “much more cautious” in his job, which has increased significantly in New York.

“Before, we treated a patient without gloves, glasses or a mask, but now we have to protect ourselves completely,” explains the paramedic.

“Our lives have changed dramatically in one month,” he says.