650 bodies remain in a disaster morgue in refrigerated trailers on the Brooklyn waterfront. In April 800 people were dying a day in NYC from COVID-19. Many of these bodies have been in cold storage since that time. This disaster morgue was set up for people whose families can’t be located or can’t afford a proper burial, officials said. Some of those families can’t be located because they died form COVID-19 as well.
At first mass burials were held at Hart Island for those who were not claimed by family. However Manhattan Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged that mass burials in temporary graves wouldn’t take place after footage of the mass burials taken by a drone were shown on social media.
NYC is slowly reducing the number of bodies in storage, with the number declining from 698 to 650 since mid-September, according to Dina Maniotis, the chief medical examiner’s office’s executive deputy commissioner.
In Texas, inmates are paid $2 an hour to move bodies to mobile morgues in freezer trucks. The sheriff’s office said the use of the inmates began on November 9 , 2020 on a volunteer basis. While prison labor is a common practice across the U.S., the reliance on inmates to handle the task of moving the corpses of COVID-19 victims is raising questions about the ethics of such work. El Paso County in Texas has about 34,000 active COVID-19 cases, with more than 1,100 people in hospitals, according to local health data. Since the pandemic began spreading widely in March, the county has recorded 769 deaths due to COVID-19. El Paso now has 10 mobile morgues. The National Guard was was then called in to to help move bodies.
With the present surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals in the Midwest are reaching capacity and they are short on staff. More than 68,500 are hospitalized with Covid-19 across the country, more than at any other point during the pandemic, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, which is run by journalists at The Atlantic. 19 percent of American hospitals are faced a staffing shortage. We should expect many more hospitalizations, and even worse staffing shortages, to come as the virus burns across the country largely unchecked.
Experts are advising people to stay at home for the Thanksgiving holiday to help slow the spread, but millions of Americans are ignoring the advice of public health experts and traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday. More than 1.04 million people went through airport security checkpoints Sunday November 22, 2020, the most since mid-March.