NYC Hospital Overwhelmed by Body Bags of Coronavirus Victims as US Death Toll Jumps to 9,600
The images were captured inside and outside the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Bushwick and show deceased patients in body bags on stretchers, as across the city and the state, hospitals are having to use every available space possible.
Other photos showed medics in protective gear transferring bodies into refrigerated trucks, which are serving as temporary morgues. Such trucks have been seen across the city, with NYC’s morgues at full capacity.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has requested 100,000 body bags, officially called human remains pouches, and the Pentagon is looking to buy more body bags, as it dips into its stockpile of 50,000, Bloomberg reported days ago.
New York, the hardest-hit state of the country, has reported more than 123,000 infections and 4,160 deaths, largely clustered around New York City.
The United States entered one of the most critical weeks so far in the coronavirus crisis with government officials warning the death toll in states such as New York, Michigan and Louisiana was a sign of trouble to come in other states.
“This is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly. This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localised,” US Surgeon General Jerome Adams stated on Sunday.
Cases of the deadly disease and number of victims in the US continued to grow on Sunday with daily tallies bringing the overall figures to nearly 337,500 cases and 9,650 fatalities, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, as the country tops the list of the COVID-19 affected nations worldwide.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump urged the American public to brace for a difficult week ahead as the coronavirus spreads rapidly across the United States, warning there would be “a lot of death” in the country. He has recently called US efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus “a matter of life and death”.
The White House has projected 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United State from the coronavirus pandemic even if current social distancing guidelines are maintained. The projections were presented during a White House briefing on Tuesday. They suggest if no social distancing measures had been put in place across the country between 1.5 million to 2.2 million people would have died.
Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), has stated that the amount of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the United States is growing so rapidly that the country has the potential to become the new epicenter of the pandemic.
The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world has exceeded one million, with the pandemic rampaging most quickly in the United States and the death toll continuing to rise in Italy, Spain and France.
Globally, the death toll from coronavirus passed a grim benchmark, topping 69,500, on Monday, with more than 1,275,000 people infected worldwide, according to a tally maintained by Johns Hopkins University.
