Duty for the dead
MUCH OF NEW YORK CITY HAS BEEN IDLE SINCE the coronavirus lockdown was declared two months ago, but not the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, an 88-acre shipping and distribution hub built in the 1960s on the east side of the city’s inner harbor, opposite the Statue of Liberty. Day and night, trucks back up to loading bays while 130 workers scamper between three football-field-size warehouses, waving in drivers and inspecting their freight.
The traffic here is no longer in goods arriving from around the world, however. It is in the dead.
The corpses arrive from across the city. Since mid-April, the bodies of New Yorkers have been pulled from homes, hospitals and alleyways, zipped up in black body bags and brought here for processing. Some died hours earlier; others have been gone for days, or even weeks. One by one, they are examined and entered into a computer tracking system. Then they are pushed up a ramp to a loading dock and stacked on wooden racks with 90 other corpses inside one of dozens of 53-ft. refrigerated tractor trailers set at 37°F to 39°F for storage.
The makeshift morgue is just one stop in a citywide cavalcade bearing an unfathomable number of bodies. Since March 14, COVID-19 has killed some 20,000 in New York City; at the height of the pandemic on April 7, two dozen people were dying every hour. But those figures don’t capture the competing challenges that the scale of death has created on the ground.
The first is logistical: How do you handle that many dead bodies in a safe and hygienic manner? The pandemic has overwhelmed
