New York funeral homes struggle to store bodies amid coronavirus crisis

With cremations delayed for weeks or more and burials being backed up, storing bodies has become an even bigger crisis.

By AARON REICH
A health worker rests near the NYU Langone Hospital, during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., May 3, 2020. (photo credit: EDUARDO MUNOZ / REUTERS)
A health worker rests near the NYU Langone Hospital, during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., May 3, 2020.
(photo credit: EDUARDO MUNOZ / REUTERS)
Being at the epicenter of the US coronavirus outbreak, the high death toll has overwhelmed everyone from the healthcare workers, morgues, funeral homes, cemeteries and crematories, and this has begun to show throughout the city, CNN reported.
New York state has suffered over 24,000 deaths from the coronavirus, most of them in New York City, resulting in storage issues over the rise of dead bodies. Though the city doubled its storage capacity, it isn't enough, and funeral homes have to turn down cremations because they lack the storage space, CNN reported. In one instance, a cremation chamber in Brooklyn actually broke due to the sheer weight of all the corpses inside.
With cremations delayed for weeks or more and burials being backed up, storing bodies has become an even bigger crisis, with refrigerated trucks and trailers in funeral home parking lots holding many of them.
One Brooklyn funeral home ordered several trucks for storage, but at least one of them was not refrigerated, causing them to put the bodies on bags of ice, one source told CNN.
The result of this was seen on Wednesday, when passersby saw the disturbing sight of four trucks with 60 decomposing bodies on the street by the funeral home, fluids dripping out from the trucks, CNN reported.
Regarding the incident, the New York State Health Department issued a statement clarifying the responsibility of funeral homes to find means of storing bodies.
"Funeral directors are required to store decedents awaiting burial or other final disposition in appropriate conditions and to follow their routine infection prevention and control precautions," the statement read.
Later, the Health Department revoked the funeral home's license.
The home's actions were "appalling, disrespectful to the families of the deceased, and completely unacceptable," New York health commissioner Howard Zucker said in a statement, according to CNN.
"It's such a sad situation and so disrespectful to the families," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told CNN Friday.
"That was an avoidable situation... There were lots of ways that the funeral home could have turned to us for help. But they stayed silent. That's a rarity. Overwhelmingly, even with the horrible strain and the emotional strain, funeral homes have really stood by the families in the city and served them."
This is just another gruesome example of a health system straining to cope with the sheer weight of the coronavirus death toll.
"So many more deaths than we could have ever imagined," Joe Sherman, the fourth-generation owner of Sherman's Flatbush Memorial Chapel in Brooklyn, said, CNN reported. "I'm doing this 43 years. I've never seen anything like it."
In addition, when funerals do happen, funeral home directors now need to ensure the safety of their clients and workers through the use of protective equipment and enforcing separation between mourners.
And these concerns are not just empty fears. In an incident at the end of April that made headlines, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews crowded the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn to mourn a rabbi who died from the coronavirus outbreak.
This was despite the efforts of the congregation, Tola’at Yaakov, who sought to hold a funeral while keeping New York's social distancing rules to curb the coronavirus’s spread. They coordinated with the NYPD, which blocked off streets in the area. The poster advertising the funeral told people to wear masks and keep two meters apart from one another.
However, the funeral soon got out of control, though this was far from an isolated incident, and it has illustrated the need for controlling funerals.
"Funerals are basically about gathering together and celebrating somebody's life and saying goodbye," Dan Wright, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 813, told CNN. "These things have been impossible to do. Funerals directors... have been reduced to becoming policemen to prevent people from getting together, standing too close, hugging each other."
Jpost Editorial contributed to this report.


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