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With more than 3,000 deaths, New York State has become the epicenter of Covid-19 in the United States. Today, the city has already recorded more deaths from the disease than in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Philip Tassi warns that the cemetery where he works is full of burial requests and that there is no time to rest: the New York state government has just announced that between Monday and Tuesday there were 731 deaths from registered coronaviruses.
“The number of burial and cremation requests has probably increased by 300%,” says Tassi of Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester, just a few miles north of Manhattan.
Currently, up to 20 bodies pass through this crematorium in 16 hours of work, 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.
“I have never seen anything like this”
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.
That number of victims was officially outmatched 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.
Several deaths from New York coronavirus are brought to mobile morgues
Image: Getty Images via BBC
The virus and the city.
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 crew member from the hospital ship sent to New York tested positive for coronavirus
Image: AFP via BBC
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.
That week, President Donald Trump authorized a military hospital ship to begin receiving covid-19 patients in Manhattan.
But in another sign that the disease is spreading uncontrollably, the United States Navy reported Tuesday that a member of the hospital ship’s crew, the USNS Comfort, was infected with the coronavirus; other servers were preemptively isolated.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has indicated that social isolation measures appear to be working
Image: AFP via BBC
Despite the record 731 deaths in New York State between Monday and Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said hospitalizations and the passage of patients to intensive care have decreased.
Luz of hope
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.
“So predicting the peak is this week, saying that what will happen next or next is impossible right now,” Hatziioannou told BBC News World.
‘Our lives will 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 surprised him this week by saying 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 death toll drops enough.
A field hospital for coronavirus patients has been set up in Central Park, New York
Image: Getty Images via BBC
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 and gloomy landscape in this opulent city, but already marked by moments of great pain.
“September 11 was a terrorist act and it scares us, it consumes us every day, whether at work or at home with our families: it seems that it talks to us all the time, that 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.
