Congested bodies in mobile morgues in New York

Covid-19 victim tragedy

At the end of his life, Ananda Mooliya, 56, still claimed to his wife and two children that he was fine even though they could hear his gasping from the next room.

His wife, Rajni Attavar, said sobbing, not long after she was wiping her face so that her husband suddenly saw her open her mouth. She tried to tremble but he did not respond. His family called for help until 911. Just 10 minutes later, paramedics showed up and used a breathing apparatus for Mr. Mooliya, but to no avail. White towels were placed on Mr. Mooliya’s body in the family kitchen. According to the death certificate, Mr. Mooliya died at 9:37 pm on April 8, the cause of death was determined to be due to a flu-like illness, possibly Covid-19.

The tragedy of Mr. Mooliya’s family does not stop there. Family members said it took several hours after his death for his body to be transferred to the morgue and that it took almost three more weeks to be cremated. Families were also unable to attend cremation due to social exclusion orders.

This is not your own family tragedy. Many other families in the New York epidemic experienced the same tragedy in the context of the rapid increase in the number of deaths due to Covid-19, which overloaded the morgue and funeral homes.

The number of deaths beyond imagination.

According to CNN, body bags piled up all over New York City. The day Mooliya died was the day in New York State, 799 people died from Covid-19. As of last weekend, the state recorded more than 24,000 deaths from Covid-19, primarily in New York City.

Although the city has doubled its ability to preserve corpses, funeral homes have been unable to process all of the bodies. A crematorium in Brooklyn was broken due to the manipulation of great amounts of bodies. Therefore, cremation operations were delayed. During this time, they were forced to preserve the bodies in refrigerated trucks. In addition, many cases opt for burial instead of cremation. “The death toll is beyond our imagination. I have been in this job for 43 years and have never seen it,” said Joe Sherman, manager of an incarnation station in Brooklyn.

“We have never seen so many cremated bodies,” said Richard Moylan, manager of the Green-Wood crematorium in Brooklyn. He added that the crematorium now has to handle about 130 bodies per week each day, an increase almost twice as compared to before the pandemic. “People are shipping bodies out of town and out of state,” Moylan said, adding that if customers had been close to calling earlier, the cremation service would be done quickly, but now Must schedule and wait.

Mobile morgues

The overcrowding of burial and burial houses has led many refrigerated trucks to become a mobile morgue to preserve corpses. In a recent incident, police discovered 60 decomposing bodies stacked in four trucks outside the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn.

The funeral home did not have space for bodies, so they used trucks to hold the bodies awaiting cremation. At least 1 of them does not have a cooling system and the body bags are only temporarily preserved with stone. On the night of April 30, 18 bodies were also discovered in a crowded funeral home in New Jersey.

“This is a sad story, showing disrespect for the family of the deceased. This is completely avoidable. They had many ways to ask us for help, but they were silent, “said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. CNN 5/1. The New York Department of Health has suspended the operating license of Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home.

Minh Phương
According to CNN