By Hadassa Kalatizadeh

Ideally, respect for the deceased is unwavering.  While many businesses are backed up due to the Coronavirus, one might expect more from morgues.  No such luck.

In April, New York City concocted an unprecedented plan to freeze bodies as space became overfilled at its morgues, hospitals and funeral homes. Bodies were wrapped in heavy vinyl bags and packed into refrigerated trucks.  As reported by the NY Post, the city has invested in an oversized warehouse behind Brooklyn’s Costco, to store the frozen remains of over 1,300 deceased, which include many victims of Covid-19.  The frozen bodies await, while families decide how they wish to bury their loved ones, or until they prepare the funds to pay for the funerals. The city said there is no time limit on how long a body may be kept there.

As of Tuesday, the designated “disaster morgue,” created during the pandemic, housed 1,344 bodies, according to a Medical Examiner’s report obtained by The Post.  That number is down since its peak of 2,000 remains, one funeral director said.  City officials refused to give The Post an accounting of how many bodies were being kept in “long-term storage.”

The storage facility, located on 39th Street in Sunset Park, cost the city about $20 million in construction, operations and maintenance, and the city said it would pursue reimbursement from FEMA.  This solution came after the city searched for places to bury the increased load of deceased bodies.  For some time, the city had been using Hart Island, the city’s potter’s field located near Riker’s jail, as a temporary burial spot.

That solution was short lived, however, after a public outcry arose at seeing published photos of mass graves being dug on the island.  The “disaster morgue,” which was designed to prevent the Hart Island mass burials, is well guarded and inaccessible to the public.  Hart Island took in about 894 bodies from March 9 through June 26 alone, as opposed to 1,100 burials all last year.  In all, 23,159 New York City residents have passed away due to the Coronavirus, as per the city Department of Health, which includes probable COVID-19 cases in its count.

“Cemeteries are giving us two- to three-week wait times,” said Doris Amen, director of Jurek Funeral Home in Park Slope.  The backed up burial sites make freezing inevitable, but there are downsides.  “You can’t embalm something frozen. You have to defrost it,” said Anthony Cassieri, who runs Brooklyn Funeral Home and Cremation Service in Brownsville.  “The freezer is great for long-term storage, but not when someone wants to have a visitation or an open-casket viewing. It creates a problem.”