Queens is about to get their own Potters Field

NY Daily News

As the number of coronavirus deaths overwhelms New York’s morgues, funeral homes and crematoriums, city officials are scrambling to find locations to temporarily store the dead.

Fort Totten, a former cemetery that’s now a park in Queens, is the likely place where the glut of bodies will be kept during the pandemic.

“If the current outbreak escalates, burials will occur at Fort Totten and Hart Island," said a March 29 email shared among high-ranking city officials. The email lays out the work required to turn Fort Totten into a burial site.

Temporary burials at Hart Island, the city’s public cemetery on the Long Island Sound where unclaimed bodies have been buried for decades, come with a slew of logistical challenges due to regular flooding and the island’s remote location.

With at least 6,182 city residents dead from COVID-19 as of Sunday night, Fort Totten will soon be tapped for temporary burials, according to sources with knowledge of the operation.

Mayor de Blasio has for more than a week declined to discuss the city’s plans for the bodies of coronavirus victims during public briefings. And his office has denied Fort Totten will be used as a site for public burials.

On Sunday, mayoral spokeswoman Avery Cohen declared, “We are not considering temporary burials at this time.” Later, Blasio’s press secretary Freddi Goldstein added: “We’ve increased capacity enough that we do not believe we’ll have to move to temporary burials.”

Nurses and funeral home directors are pissed about the bureaucratic bullshit affecting their jobs from the state and city

 

NY Post

 New York State nurses and other hospital workers are being exposed to “dangerous working conditions” amid the coronavirus pandemic because of “critical shortages” of personal protective gear, and they want “urgent action” from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to provide them with the equipment they need.

 That’s the message in a blistering April 11 letter sent by the New York State Nurses Association’s director to Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, obtained by The Post.

The letter contradicts comments made by Melissa de Rosa, secretary to Gov. Cuomo, at a press briefing last week, in which she said that hospitals were receiving stockpiled PPE equipment and that no health care facilities in the state would have to resort to “crisis conservation.”

That means the reusing of masks, hospital gowns and other equipment meant to guard against the spread of COVID-19.

“At this point most hospitals and nursing homes in the New York City metropolitan area, which is the national epicenter of the pandemic, continue to operate under ‘crisis conservation’ standards because they do not have enough PPE to distribute to our desperate staff,” wrote Patricia Kane, the executive director of the Nurses Association, the union which represents 42,000 frontline nurses in the state.

NY Post

Frazzled funeral home directors are complaining about the invasion of the municipal body snatchers.
At least two Queens funeral directors say the city’s red tape is making their grim backlog of bodies even worse, as remains are sent to Randall’s Island for storage with little or no notice — and retrieving them has become nearly impossible.

Omar Rodriguez was scheduled to pick up two bodies last week from Elmhurst Hospital, only to find out the night before they’d been packed into two mobile morgues and taken to Randall’s Island.
But once there, workers on the island told him the bodies needed to go back to the hospital before they could be released, he said.

“I spoke to everybody and their mothers about how to get the bodies but no one had an answer,” he told The Post. “I was going back-and-forth. I told them I’m here, release the bodies to me. Eight hours later they were released on Randall’s Island.”

People dead from coronavirus brought to Hart's Island for mass burial

Untapped Cities  

Until the coronavirus pandemic, Hart Island was one of the New York City’s most forgotten places. Yet, since 1869 it has been serving as the city’s potters field, an active burial place for those who are too poor to afford a burial or who die unclaimed. Today, around a million souls are lying in rest there and that number is increasing quickly. A lot of confusion has circled around Hart Island in the past few days, but what is known is that the pace of burials is increasing there — five times the normal rate, in fact. Burials have traditionally been performed by New York City Department of Corrections detainees, a practice that began over a century ago and was still in place until the pandemic. But now, contracted laborers are doing the burials.Officially, COVID-19 patients are not being buried on 

Hart Island but that only counts confirmed cases. With a marked increase in deaths at home, and the slow ramp-up of testing availability, it is believed that COVID-19 cases are being grossly undercounted here. New York City mayoral spokesperson, Freddi Goldestein, did make a statement addressing the likelihood that COVID-19 victims are buried there, saying, “For decades, Hart Island has been used to lay to rest decedents who have not been claimed by family members. We will continue using the Island in that fashion during this crisis and it is likely that people who have passed away from COVID-19 who fit this description will be buried on the Island in the coming days.”

6,000

NY Daily News

About 6,000 homeless New Yorkers who are suffering from coronavirus or are at risk of getting the disease are going to taken out of shelters and put into hotels, Mayor de Blasio announced Saturday.

“We think it is the right balance to strike to make sure that they get what they need and be safe,” the mayor said during a press conference from City Hall. “We will use those hotels aggressively as a tool to support homeless individuals, to strike the right balance in our shelters to make sure people who need to be isolated are isolated."

The move from shelters to hotels should be completed by Monday, de Blasio said. The hotels will be available to singles, not families.

Priority placement will be given to seniors, anyone with COVID-19 symptoms or anyone diagnosed with the virus, de Blasio said.

 “They, of course, will be isolated in hotel settings,” the mayor said.

 

NY Post

 More than 6,000 people in New York City have succumbed to coronavirus, the latest figures show.

The Big Apple’s death toll now stands at 6,367, an increase of from the 5,463 previously reported on Saturday, according to the NYC Health Department.

There have been more than 98,000 cases in the city, resulting in at least 27,000 hospitalizations, the health department said.

The highest rate of cases has been reported in Staten Island, which is followed by the Bronx and Queens, according to the figures.

4,000

Daily Mail

 The coronavirus death toll in New York City hit more than 4,000 Wednesday morning. 

On Tuesday evening deaths had risen by 806 to 3,544 in just 24 hours. The figure is almost double the number of deaths recorded Monday in the country's coronavirus epicenter. 

The nationwide death toll rose by almost 2,000 yesterday - America's deadliest day from the virus yet - and currently stands at 12,953.  

 City transit needs to be shut down too.

At least 41 MTA workers have died from coronavirus and 1,500 have tested positive, the MTA chairman announced on Tuesday as the New York City death toll surpassed 4,000. 

Transit workers are among those who are deemed essential employees and are still required to go to work despite the ongoing pandemic.

Many have told of their frustration at members of the public not taking the threat seriously and some have even died after sharing their concerns.

Chairman and CEO Patrick J. Foye said on Wednesday during an interview with WCBS 880: 'We mourn the loss of every one of our 41 colleagues.' 

Foye is among those who has tested positive for the virus. 

'I happen to be one of those, but the real loss is the grieving that we're doing at the MTA and the families of the 41 MTA colleagues who have been killed by the virus,' he said.   

The MTA has give workers 300,000 N-95 masks and 160,000 surgical masks since March 1.

de Blasio acknowledges overlooked higher amount of deaths from coronavirus.

NY Daily News

Mayor de Blasio once again refused to detail the city’s capacity to handle the bodies of coronavirus victims – and admitted officials are also likely undercounting the number of people who have died during the pandemic.

The mayor said Tuesday he assumes most people in New York City who have died at home in recent weeks without being tested or treated for COVID-19 likely had the deadly disease.

“I am assuming the vast majority of those deaths are coronavirus related,” de Blasio said at a briefing. “It’s understandable in a crisis that being able to make the confirmation is harder to do with all the resources stretched so thin…The first use of all of everything we’ve got – our professionals, our health care workers, our resources – the first thing we are focused on is saving the next life.”

The city reported 3,202 people have died of COVID-19 as of Tuesday morning, a 29.37% jump from the 2,475 deaths logged just 24 hours before, according to the city Health Department.

The medical examiner’s office has enough space in borough-based morgues for about 800 to 900 bodies during normal times.

Officials said this capacity has expanded significantly since the pandemic began – with 80 mobile refrigerated trucks and a temporary morgue tent. Hospitals also have morgues.

But the medical examiner’s office won’t say how much space the city currently has for the bodies of coronavirus victims. De Blasio has also repeatedly refused to discuss how the city will handle a surge in bodies as the death toll rapidly climbs in the next weeks.

The city is considering burying coronavirus casualties in public parks

NY Post

A leading New York City lawmaker said Monday that officials may be forced to temporarily begin burying the city’s coronavirus victims in local parks — as morgues and hospitals struggle to keep up with the mounting death toll, a city councilman said Monday.

“Soon we’ll start ‘temporary interment’,” said Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan) wrote in a series of tweets. “This likely will be done by using a NYC park for burials (yes you read that right). Trenches will be dug for 10 caskets in a line.”

“It will be done in a dignified, orderly–and temporary–manner. But it will be tough for NYers to take,” Levine wrote, adding in another tweet, “The goal is to avoid scenes like those in Italy, where the military was forced to collect bodies from churches and even off the streets.”

He later clarified his tweets, saying this “is a contingency NYC is preparing for BUT if the death rate drops enough it will not be necessary.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio was asked about the grim matter during a coronavirus press briefing Monday at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“We may well be dealing with temporary burials, so we can deal with each family later,” the mayor said. We will have the capacity for temporary burials – that’s all I’m going to say.”

“I’m not going into details,” de Blasio said. “I don’t think it’s a great thing to be talking about.”

However, Hizzoner did mention city-owned Hart Island — the city’s longtime potter’s field and nation’s largest public burial ground, which sits just off The Bronx’s southeast coast in the Long Island Sound.

“We’re going to try and treat every family with dignity, respect religious needs of those who are devout, and the focus now is to try and get through this crisis and obviously also put all of our energy and resources into saving those we can save,” he added.

A spokeswoman for the city’s Medical Examiner’s office, Aja Worthy-Davis, told The Post there are no plans currently to begin temporary burials and that the freezers at agency facilities in Manhattan and Brooklyn have “adequate space.”

“We have no plans right now to bury anyone in city parks,” said Worthy-Davis, noting that the disturbing scenario is mentioned in a previous OCME disaster plan, but “it’s not in the works at this time.”

There is nothing dignified about this plan at all. Also undignified is the fact that this city did not did not prepare and was ill-equipped to handle a major emergency. 

Levine may be doing all the talking and tweeting about this, but this ghoulish idea has de Blasio's micromanaging style all over it.

Rikers Island convicts get tasked with burying the casualties of COVID-19

The Intercept

 New York City is offering prisoners at Rikers Island jail $6 per hour — a fortune by prison labor standards — and personal protective equipment if they agree to help dig mass graves on Hart Island, according to sources with knowledge of the offer. Avery Cohen, a spokesperson for the office of 

Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed the general arrangement, but said that it was not “Covid-specific,” noting that prisoners have been digging graves on Hart Island for years.

The offer is only being made to those with convictions, not those jailed before trial, as is generally the case. A memo sent to prisoners, according to a source who reviewed it, does not specify what the work on Hart Island will be, but the reference to PPE leaves little doubt. The offer comes as New York City continues to be the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, with 38,000 people infected and more than 914 dead so far. New York City owns and operates a public cemetery on Hart Island, which has long been maintained by prison labor. The island was identified as a potential resting place for a surge of bodies in the event of a pandemic by a 2008 report put together by the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

Hart Island, though, “has limited burial space,” the report noted, and “may not be able to accommodate a large influx of decedents requiring burial,” which the preparedness plan estimated at between 50,000 and 200,000 in a pandemic with a mortality rate of 2 percent in which 25 to 35 percent of the population is infected.

The city document proposed employing the Department of Defense’s “temporary mass internment method,” which places caskets 10 in a row, head to foot, so as not to stack them on top of each other. Hart Island is located off City Island in the Bronx. In 2008, Rikers prisoners were burying roughly 20 to 25 bodies per week there, the report found.

New York's derelict mayor ends his farcical presidential run

 

 

Welcome back ya bum

                                                                                                                                                                           

D.A. Richard Brown has died

QNS


Richard A. Brown, who served Queens for 28 years as its top law enforcement official, has died, his office announced on Saturday morning.

Brown, 86, had been battling from complications of Parkinson’s disease in recent years and announced in March that he was taking a leave of absence until June 1, when he planned to formally resign the office. He handed over his duties in an interim capacity to Chief District Attorney John Ryan, his top deputy, who announced Brown’s death.

“Judge Brown — as he has long been affectionately called — was a public servant like no other,” Ryan said. “He topped a spectacular judicial career and was appointed the district attorney of Queens County in 1991 by then-Governor Mario Cuomo. He was proud to serve the millions of people of Queens for nearly 28 years and was re-elected to six terms in office.”