The surge of critically ill COVID-19 patients has now given way to a crush of bodies that has overwhelmed hospital morgues, fleets of additional refrigeration trucks, and the funeral homes and crematoriums meant to help loved ones find some form of closure.
More than 1,500 people died in a 48-hour period in New York City this week, according to the city Health Department. That still fails to capture the full extent of the crisis, as city officials are still not releasing numbers of probable COVID-19 deaths where tests were not conducted.
At one hospital in Queens, a physician who oversees an intensive care unit said the hospital was struggling to find places to put the dead. Before the pandemic, they’d see 10 to 15 deaths a week, he said. Now they’re seeing 20 to 25 a day.
“That’s why people may not be getting ICU care in an expeditious fashion and are stuck on a ventilator on the floor,” said the doctor, who asked for his name and the name of his employer withheld because he didn't have permission to speak to the press. “There’s no place to put the body that died in the ICU three hours previously.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, he said, the hospital had more than 500 COVID-19 patients, 83 of whom were on ventilators. Of those on ventilators, 23 were in regular hospital rooms waiting to be moved into intensive care units, he added.
The refrigerated trucks the hospital is using as extra morgue space had filled up, forcing the hospital to use unrefrigerated space in storage rooms throughout the hospital, he described. He recently followed a “transporter,” whose job it is to move patients and bodies throughout the facility, to one of those makeshift locations.
“Twelve to fourteen [bodies], in a 15’ by 15’ room, literally side by side on the stretchers. It’s horrible, horrible, it’s terrible,” the doctor said. “I’m not sure there are any good solutions about where to put them.”
Inside a refrigerated morgue truck
Erik Frampton, an out-of-work custom art framer, was recently hired by a funeral director to help handle the surge of corpses at a Bronx hospital. When he arrived at the location on Monday morning, he found a refrigeration truck filled with dozens of corpses stacked one on top of another, even though the official protocol from the city’s office of emergency management says “decedents should never be stacked.”
Instead of 40 to 44 bodies in the trailer, there were close to a hundred, he said. He spent two days moving and stacking corpses and inserting shelving to create more space. Frampton also asked for the name of the hospital and his employer to be withheld because he doesn’t want them to be singled out for criticism.
“It’s a very gruesome jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t make any sense for the living or the dead, but it got done,” said Framptom. “No one is doing anything wrong. Everyone is doing what they can and yet, it’s all wrong.”
Framptom described wearing garbage bags on his feet and legs and an N95 mask, while standing in a mess of bodily fluids as they rearranged the corpses.
“There’s too many corpses.”
The backlog of the dead extends from hospital morgues and refrigeration trucks to funeral homes. At Sisto Funeral Home in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx, funeral director Ralph Faiella has found cremations to be the biggest challenge, because the city’s four crematoria—two in Queens, one in Brooklyn, and another in the Bronx—are already booked for weeks.
Listen to Gwynne Hogan discuss the backlog hospitals, the morgue, and funeral homes are facing on WNYC:
“My next available cremation date, if I put on a funeral today, is April 27th. That means a body [is] being held for 20-something days,” said Faiella. He said the backlog means he can’t pick up any more bodies from the hospitals.
“The hospitals want us to come—they really do,” Faiella said. “But it really comes down to the aspect of, we can’t hold the bodies for this extended period of time.”
Katie Mueller, with St. Michael’s Crematorium in Elmhurst, Queens, said they’re booking three times as many cremations as they usually do on a given day, but their earliest opening is now on April 22nd.
“We’re trying to do as much as we can,” she said, “We have triple shifts here in our crematorium.”
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is refusing to talk about how the dead are being handled.
“The reason I don’t want to get into deep and graphic discussion on this issue is I just don’t think it’s fair to New Yorkers and I don’t think it’s fair to families who are grieving,” he said at a press conference Thursday. “I think the dignity that we have to give to all families that are suffering is not to make this a public issue.”
“Are we able to address this painful reality?” he asked. “My answer to all New Yorkers is yes.”
The city has recently quadrupled its morgue capacity to handle 3,400 to 3,600 bodies with a patchwork of refrigerated trucks and climate controlled tents, according to the Medical Examiner’s office. Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokesperson for the office, declined to say how much space was left. The city has said it may need to bury people temporarily at its public burial site on Hart Island if morgue capacity is exceeded. A spokeswoman declined to comment on how much space was left in city morgues.
On Thursday, the Associated Press published aerial photos showing large graves being dug on the island, and the city’s corrections department confirmed they’d increased burials dramatically, from 25 burials a week to 24 a day on Hart Island. And the city’s medical examiner had quietly changed its policy saying it would keep bodies for a “reasonable period of time,” before burial on Hart Island, which a spokeswoman last week said last week was as long as 90 days, reducing that down to 14 days.
An open letter from the National Funeral Directors Association published earlier this week asked Governor Andrew Cuomo to waive certain state liscensing requirements to allow out of state professionals to help. “Medical examiners and funeral homes in NYC are overwhelmed. Families are needlessly suffering because they can't bury their dead. The National Funeral Directors Association and funeral service professionals around the country want to help!” the group wrote.
The letter was originally reported by the NY Post.
But families who’ve lost loved ones to the virus are also having to make hard decisions. Anne Wolfson’s 95-year-old father died of pneumonia at a Riverdale nursing home Saturday and was presumed to have had the virus.
Her father had wanted to be cremated, but the family was told it would take weeks. Instead, they accepted an offer from the funeral home to bury him at a location in New Jersey at no additional cost. Six days later, the family was still waiting for confirmation that he’d been buried. “It’s probably sitting in a refrigerator some place,” Wolfson said.
She said her mother was cremated two years ago.
“We were able to arrange to have her ashes spread in a pretty place,” she said. “It feels strange not to be able to do that for my father.”
