Temporary mass grave in public parks

[jon-nyc]

I think they still want to be able to turn the bodies over to the families and funeral homes. It’s just that there are too many now.

[mark]

That's pretty disgusting, and isn't it dangerous at some level?

[jon-nyc]

What can they do when the freezers are full and the funeral homes and crematoria have backlogs?

They want to avoid the scenes from Italy where bodies were stored at home or stacked in churches.

[George K]

@jon-nyc said in Temporary mass grave in public parks:

What can they do when the freezers are full and the funeral homes and crematoria have backlogs?

They want to avoid the scenes from Italy where bodies were stored at home or stacked in churches.

Or Ecuador, where they lay in the streets.

[Mik]

It’s a case of picking the least horrible alternative. This is sadly going to leave a scar on New Yorkers.

[mark]

I think making emergency crematoriums would be a better solution.

[LuFins Dad]

How many bodies can the the morgues, funeral homes, and trucks contain? What are the current projections? Any chances of using other types of units?

[jodi]

Don’t catholics hav to be buried, not cremated?

[Aqua Letifer]

@jodi No, they accept cremations now.

[Jolly]

@mark said in Temporary mass grave in public parks:

I think making emergency crematoriums would be a better solution.

I agree.

Try to keep the bodies separate, so the families receive their loved one's ashes.

[mark]

@Jolly Yes. It only takes a few hours to cremate a body. Line up a hundred or two and get it done.

[LuFins Dad]

Ok, the hospitals, morgues, and trucks can handle 3600-3800 corpses at one time. NYC CFR has been at a shockingly high 3.6% so far 65000 cases and 2500 deaths. Now 1000 of those deaths happened over a week ago, so you would like to think that most of those have cleared through by this point, leaving 1500 currently in the morgues, so you have about 2,000 capacity remaining. At this point, it doesn’t look like the number of cases is going to double over the next week, so unless the CFR takes an enormous jump above it’s already high level, it should be manageable.

[Copper]

What happened to "we have fewer deaths now"?

Is the problem that a few areas are hard hit?

[Mik]

NYC has a very large Jewish population. Not sure mass cremation is going to go over well.

[mark]

why should we let religious traditions put everyone at risk?

[Mik]

Not religious traditions, Mark. History. Fairly recent at that.

[LuFins Dad]

Turns out it was a bunch of crap and more fear mongering.

This was the councilman that started the whole thing.

[LuFins Dad]

If you go back to the NYT article, you will see that it has been massively updated.

[jon-nyc]

It wasn’t a bunch of crap and it wasn’t fear mongering. They floated the idea and got pushback.

Note they’re still planning for temporary internment if it’s necessary. It’s apparently been in their ‘tier 2’ or ‘tier 3‘ contingency planning for over a decade. In the discussion yesterday they said Hart Island was a consideration but they preferred not to have to deal with the security issues (it’s partly controlled by Dept of Corrections) so they were looking into using an out of the way part of a public park instead.

That’s not just a random councilman either, he heads the health committee.

My guess is once word got out they realized any logistical inconvenience of using Hart Island paled in comparison to the political problem with using some out of the way park space.

[LuFins Dad]

So they go from ordering mobile morgues (a smart, prudent, and unfortunately necessary move) to planning on digging mass graves in the park? Because that makes so much more sense than renting more mobile morgues or even commercial refrigerated trailers and/or shipping containers. Instead of trying to get the old Krasdale refrigerated warehouse up and running, let’s go straight to bodies wrapped in Hefty bags buried in the park.

There’s being prudent and planning for worst case scenarios and then there’s hell, I don’t even know what to call this, but the situation is bad enough as it is and doesn’t need public officials imagining scenarios orders of magnitude worse than it is and feeding those those same thoughts to a ratings hungry press and a confused and scared public.