Mass burials,
funerals postponed indefinitely,
mobile morgues shipped out
and Zoom funerals?
These are some of the many ways countries
around the world are handling the more than
200,000 people dead
as a result
of the novel coronavirus.
This is just unprecedented
in the history of this city or country.
We are experiencing the loss of
a 9/11 a couple times a week.
That's going on week after week.
For now,
it's meant huge changes
to the rituals of how people
say goodbye - and, ultimately, grieve.
When a funeral takes place,
tons of people come out
because it's a loved one, a community member.
Now with corona and the pandemic,
loved ones can't be with their family members in the
hospital as they're taking their last breaths.
Will this pandemic change the way society mourns?
Italy was the first European country to lock down -
but those measures didn't stop its death toll
from quickly exceeding China's.
Italians were told funerals were canceled indefinitely.
It hit hard in a country still heavily
influenced by strong Roman Catholic values and traditions.
People were reportedly dying alone, with their bodies
sealed in their homes
because Italy was running out of coffins
to store them.
Army convoys had to dispose of bodies.
Undertakers were infected on the job,
despite wearing protective gear.
Within a matter of days,
Italy would also have to make huge changes to its daily life,
and countries around the world would soon follow.
The U.S. now has more than a million confirmed cases of COVID-19,
with the highest numbers of
hospitalizations and deaths
in New York City.
To call New York the epicenter of
corona in the United States
wouldn't even do justice to what's really happening here.
The number of people dying in New York City is probably
5 or more times regular levels.
We are so far
beyond the normal pace of deaths
in New York City, and we need to take extraordinary measures.
It's like Italy was.
Doctors lacking PPE,
funeral homes overwhelmed,
regional lockdowns, and, in some places,
military intervention.
But unlike Italy,
New York was already struggling with
finding places to bury the dead before the pandemic
even started.
I represent a district in northern Manhattan that has been
extremely hard-hit by this virus,
disproportionately,
as have all communities of color throughout New York City
and all low-income communities really nationally.
The result is that we've had a lot of fatalities.
My office is called on regularly
by families who are not able to get a funeral home
or not able to get cremation services.
This is really tough.
Religious communities across the U.S. have
been hit hard by the novel coronavirus.
This is a look inside the Islamic International Funeral Home
in Brooklyn, New York.
It shows the strain death care workers are facing.
The ritual washing that we would do
is not something that is possible
both for just kind of the safety of the funeral home staff,
as well as this literal seal that is on most of these bodies.
Once New York's hospitals became overwhelmed,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped in
to supply refrigerator trucks to serve as temporary morgues.
Then came the 100,000 body bags from the department of defense
to account for what was described as a
best-case scenario death toll.
But, even with the government's assistance,
the city's hospitals have limited room to store bodies.
This is a major challenge for
both the Muslim and Jewish communities of New York City, where
a quick burial is the tradition
and where there are strict levels of observance related to burial.
This means funeral homes, morgues and crematories
are hitting capacity,
even those operating 24 hours a day with military assistance.
The prayer is, instead of presided over by
hundreds if not thousands, will be at most like a handful of people,
and they will then take the body to the burial site
and the burial grounds are also restricting
the number of funerals that can happen in a day,
which adds further delay to it.
So, all in all, it creates a lot of challenge, a lot of stress,
a lot of emotional kind of angst for people whose loved ones
have passed away.
Add into the mix a lack of PPE for morticians and their staff,
the combination has crippled New York's death care system
and forced city officials to look towards its backup plan.
This plan was originally established back in 2008.
The “Pandemic Influenza Surge Plan” was
made by New York’s chief medical examiner.
The document states that if and when the city runs out of
space for bodies, temporary internment would occur at
Hart Island.
Hart Island has been part of the history of New York
for 150 years since the Civil War.
And it's been a part of almost every major episode
from smallpox to tuberculosis to the Spanish flu.
Hart has always been a place where people who had no other option
have been buried, and so it's people who perhaps died without
the money for private burial or died isolated, perhaps because they
were homeless, had no next of kin.
This is a little bit different now.
There just isn't enough capacity in
funeral homes and in private cemeteries.
But this 1-mile stretch of land that’s home to more than
a million bodies was already on its way to reaching capacity.
Mass graves stacked on top of each other.
More than 100 bodies buried per burial plot.
And the island itself is owned by the Department of Corrections,
which means that for over 150 years, prisoners from nearby
Rikers Island have buried New York's unclaimed bodies.
It's like a twist out of a Dickens novel
that we'd have inmates doing that work.
However, one thing has changed.
Prisoners for the first time ever started to refuse to do this work
because of their understandable fear
of catching the virus from the bodies.
Now the burials there are being done
no longer by inmates, but by a private contractor.
And if you’re wondering why the city can’t just go ahead
and cremate bodies to make more space, there are several reasons.
One, cremation laws.
Each state has specific regulations when it comes to cremation.
New York’s laws specifically state that an individual cannot
be cremated without written consent from
that individual or immediate family.
Within certain religions, for example Islam and Judaism,
cremation is strictly forbidden.
a lot of Muslim leaders have had conversations with
the mayor's office to discuss what that means
and they've given complete assurance that there will be no cremation,
which is problematic in our religious tradition,
nor will there be any mass burial grounds.
Even if the body isn’t cremated, a quick mass burial
goes against many religious beliefs.
But according to the officials,
there really isn't another option, even for those
who die with family who are actively engaged and even
family who have financial resources.
It's not really about that right now.
There just isn't enough capacity
in funeral homes and in private cemeteries.
But this too is only temporary, because in this
very same planning document, officials also note
that the island quote “may not be able to
accommodate a large influx of decedents requiring burial,"
something this pandemic has unfortunately spurred.
So, the city might need to consider drafting
a backup plan for its backup plan.
Imam Latif says his community already has.
Our funeral prayer also has a version of it that
can be prayed without the body being present,
and where people are able to perform that on their own in their home
to kind of help them in their own healing process,
so to speak, and let them be there.
Leaving some to resort to their only option:
livestreaming burials.
they will livestream so that people can at least
witness the prayer being done, see the burial taking place,
and be a part of it as best as they can
in the given circumstances.
No one knows what the long-term impact of these
changes might be after the pandemic passes.
Just like 9/11 changed everything about how we
handle security in New York City and in the world,
in some positive ways and in some that were excessive and,
in my opinion, unwarranted, this crisis is also going to change
I think everything about how we deal with health care,
how we prepare for pandemics and, ultimately, also how
we prepare to handle our dead in such cases.
Will it unite humanity or deepen the divide?
We had members of our community who said that they were
getting word from various funeral agencies that it'd
be $10,000 to bury someone.
And to jump from $1,500, $2,000 to 5 times that amount
when many people are struggling,
it creates unnecessary burden.
But coronavirus has definitely sparked a larger conversation
about how society conceptualizes death.
This pandemic has revealed so much, right?
You have immense beauty and goodness from
these doctors and first responders who are made of
whatever they're made of that they're getting up every day,
and despite the amount of illness and death that they're absorbing
and their sheer exhaustion, they're still going
to help people and still support people in their time of need.
But then you have a lot of revelations of real greed and
real selfishness and ugliness, and people are hoarding and
they're raising prices to take advantage of things
in their own self-interest and egocentricity.
This is an incredibly tough situation
and happening with just a brutal
and relentless death rate.
And though we do appear to finally be
moving in the right direction, we need to understand
that we're still in a really difficult place today.