{"id":25610,"date":"2020-05-01T02:09:25","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T02:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/virusreports.net\/we-ran-out-of-space-bodies-pile-up-as-n-y-struggles-to-bury-its-dead\/"},"modified":"2020-05-01T02:09:25","modified_gmt":"2020-05-01T02:09:25","slug":"we-ran-out-of-space-bodies-pile-up-as-n-y-struggles-to-bury-its-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/virusreports.net\/we-ran-out-of-space-bodies-pile-up-as-n-y-struggles-to-bury-its-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We Ran Out of Space\u2019: Bodies Pile Up as N.Y. Struggles to Bury Its Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The 40-foot trailer has been there for weeks, parked outside the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home in Queens. Its refrigerator hums in an alley next to a check-cashing establishment. Thirty-six bodies, one atop the other, are stacked on shelves inside.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The funeral director, Patrick Kearns, has barely slept since the day he took charge of them. As he lies awake in the middle of the night, he knows there will be more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt weighs on you, having so many cases in your care,\u201d he said. \u201cThe death rate is just so high, there\u2019s no way we can bury or cremate them fast enough.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With more than 18,000 announced fatalities and a total death toll that is almost certainly higher, the coronavirus crisis is the worst mass casualty event to hit New York since the Spanish flu pandemic<\/a> a century ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the height of the outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes \u2014 more than 800 per day, or four times the city\u2019s normal death rate. And though the daily toll has recently slowed, hundreds of bodies are still emerging each day from private homes and hospitals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While hospitals bore the initial brunt of the crisis as sick people flooded emergency rooms, the sheer volume of human remains has pushed the system for caring for the dead to its limits, too: Hospital morgues, funeral homes, cemeteries and crematories are all overflowing and backed up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The scale of the problem was brought into sharp relief on Wednesday afternoon, when the police found dozens of decomposing bodies <\/a>stashed inside two trucks outside a funeral home on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn. The owner, Andrew T. Cleckley, said he had nowhere else to put them, adding simply: \u201cI ran out of space.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What happened in Brooklyn appears to be an extreme case, and state health officials said on Thursday they would investigate the matter. But in the last two months, funeral home directors have begun to store bodies in viewing rooms and chapels, turning up their air-conditioning systems to avoid decomposition. Some are transporting bodies<\/a> to other cities and states to be cremated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Some hospitals ran out of body bags \u2014 the city has since distributed 20,000 \u2014 and others have used forklifts to transfer piles of corpses <\/a>into makeshift mobile morgues. So many people have been dying at home that the medical examiner’s office has turned to teams of soldiers working around the clock to pick them up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cemetery administrators have been scrambling to meet the need for burials, and the city\u2019s four crematories are backed up for weeks. To stave off a secondary public health emergency, any bodies left unclaimed for 14 days were, for a time, being buried at a potter\u2019s field on Hart Island in the Bronx<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For the families of the dead, the overloaded system has turned the already painful act of mourning into a kind of anxious torture. Some have found it hard to track the bodies of their loved ones as they move from morgue to morgue. Others have had trouble hiring hearses, which are now in high demand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Because of social distancing rules, wakes are often not permitted, and funerals that once took days to arrange can sometimes now take weeks \u2014 if they can happen at all. Even when they do occur, extended families are not supposed to touch one another or get too close as they stand beside a grave.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe wanted to grieve together, and we weren\u2019t able to,\u201d said Reginald Teekasingh, whose grandfather was buried by Mr. Kearns. \u201cNothing was like it should be.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Image<\/span><\/p>\n<\/source><\/source><\/source>\"Patrick<\/img><\/picture><\/div>

Patrick Kearns, right, in his office at the Leo Kearns Funeral Home, which has been in his family for four generations.<\/span>Credit…<\/span>Sarah Blesener for The New York Times<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Funeral directors like Mr. Kearns have found themselves in the middle of a logjam, besieged at one end by constant calls for pickups from hospitals or nursing homes and stymied at the other by an inability to cremate or bury people quickly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A fourth-generation funeral director, Mr. Kearns, 50, has always thought of himself as \u201ca final responder\u201d to the neighborhoods his family has served since 1900. Some of those communities, like Richmond Hill, Jackson Heights and Corona in Queens, have been among the hardest-hit sections of New York.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In an average month, Mr. Kearns performs some 30 or 40 funerals, but in April alone he expected the number to be about 200. And that, he said, was on top of the 150 more he was asked to do but couldn\u2019t because he lacked the energy and equipment. His supply of caskets has at times run short.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Though he has spent his life around death, Mr. Kearns has never seen anything like the coronavirus crisis. Death certificates have been difficult to file; cremation permits have been hard to obtain; and keeping track of the endless wave of bodies has been harrowing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cMy stress levels just keep going up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On April 17, for instance, Mr. Kearns dispatched two assistants to Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens to retrieve a body, but the person they had been sent to find was not on the correct shelf in the hospital\u2019s mobile morgue. Locating the body required hunting through dozens of others in the darkness with a flashlight, comparing names and numbers with the data in their log.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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All of this has exacted a toll. In the past few weeks, Mr. Kearns said, he has lost 20 pounds and missed most family dinners. On a recent evening, working in his trailer, he tripped and smashed his head against a shelf. After blacking out, he woke on the floor among the corpses. His wife and business partner forced him to go home.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m looking forward to the end,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s all I can say.\u201d<\/p>\n