New York City Still has Hundreds of Bodies in Freezer Trucks, Months After COVID-19 Deaths

New York City Still has Hundreds of Bodies in Freezer Trucks, Months After COVID-19 Deaths

When this history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, both New York City and the state will feature prominently…as examples of what not to do.

For example, hundreds of New Yorkers’ bodies remain frozen in trucks on the Brooklyn waterfront more than six months after the coronavirus first struck the area.

An emergency disaster morgue was set up in April on the 39th Street Pier in the Sunset Park neighborhood – and it’s there where roughly 650 bodies are being stored in the freezer trucks, the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner confirmed to The Post on Sunday.

Many of the bodies are of people whose families either cannot be located or cannot afford a proper burial, the agency said.

Dina Maniotis, the executive deputy commissioner for the OCME who oversaw the unit’s pandemic response, told the Wall Street Journal that the city was slowly disposing of the remains.

The refrigerated morgue trucks were placed across the city’s boroughs to assist the city’s overstressed hospital system during the first surge in Covid-19 cases. Most of the city’s unclaimed dead are buried on Hart Island, the nation’s largest public cemetery site.

Shocking images from the deadly months of April and May showed footage from a potter’s grave on Hart Island, which the city has used to bury unidentified or unclaimed bodies for more than 150 years, as workers in white protective gear buried bodies in simple wood coffins in deep trenches on the island.

The footage underscored a wider issue of the deaths of marginalised New Yorkers as well as the city’s overtaxes healthcare systems. City officials struck back at reports stoking fears of “mass graves” ahead of surging infections.

Meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio is warning that the city faces new restrictions as data shows COVID-19 cases are still rising…and NYC’s struggling businesses are bracing for another hit during the usually prosperous holiday season.

“The restrictions that are coming. I’ve been very overt in the fact that the governor said an orange zone is coming. By our own projections, based on the state data, that will happen soon after Thanksgiving, probably the first week of December,” de Blasio said during a radio appearance.

Those restrictions would include closing indoor dining, gyms, and salons.

Daniel Meyer, a New York City restaurateur and the Chief Executive Officer of the Union Square Hospitality Group, is closing indoor and outdoor dining at Union Square Café as well as of all of his other restaurants.

Currently, the city is offering only 25 percent indoor capacity, and that could be in jeopardy if the city enters the so-called “orange zone.” Under state guidelines, New York City would need a seven-day 3 percent positivity rate for 10 straight days to move into the orange zone.

New restrictions would suspend indoor dining for at least ten days. Outdoor dining would still be permitted, but that’s undoubtedly a challenge as winter approaches.

Many former New Yorkers have to leave a forwarding address for Santa Claus this year due to a mass exodus away from all the restrictions and the crime.

More than 300,000 New Yorkers have bailed from the Big Apple in the last eight months, new stats show.

City residents filed 295,103 change of address requests from March 1 through Oct. 31, according to data The Post obtained from the US Postal Service under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Since the data details only when 11 or more forwarding requests were made to a particular county outside NYC, the number of moves is actually higher. And a single address change could represent an entire household, which means far more than 300,000 New Yorkers fled the five boroughs.

Whatever the exact number, the exodus — which began when COVID-19 hit the city in early spring — is much greater than in prior years.

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