After much speculation, it is official COVID-19 victims are being buried at Hart Island in The Bronx.
Aerial photos taken Thursday by the Associated Press shows workers wearing hazmat suits or other personal protective equipment (PPE) while digging graves on NYC’s Hart Island, Syracuse News reported.
“For social distancing and safety reasons, city-sentenced people in custody are not assisting in burials for the duration of the pandemic,” Department of Correction spokesman Jason Kersten told N.Y Post
” Now This” obtained drone footage of these burials taking place.
This drone footage captures NYC workers burying bodies in a mass grave on Hart Island, just off the coast of the Bronx. For over a century, the island has served as a potter’s field for deceased with no known next of kin or families unable to pay for funerals. pic.twitter.com/wBVIGlX6aK
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 9, 2020
Hart island is located at the western end of Long Island Sound, in the northeast Bronx, New York City. Measuring approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) long by 0.33 miles (0.53 km) wide
The island’s first public use was as a training ground for the United States Colored Troops in 1864. Since then, Hart Island has been the location of a Union Civil War prison camp, a psychiatric institution, a tuberculosis sanatorium, a potter’s field with mass burials, a homeless shelter, a boys’ reformatory, a jail, and a drug rehabilitation center.
The remains of more than one million people are buried on Hart Island, though since the first decade of the 21st century, there are fewer than 1,500 burials a year.
TJV reported earlier this week that the use of Hart Island was a possibility after a councilman spread the macabre rumor that the city was going to use public parks to bury victims.
