As New York City deals with a mounting coronavirus death toll and dwindling morgue space, the city has shortened the amount of time it will hold unclaimed remains before they are buried in the city’s public cemetery. Under the new policy, the medical examiner’s office will keep bodies in storage for just 14 days before they’re buried in the city’s potter’s field on Hart Island. Normally, about 25 bodies a week are interred on the island, mostly for people whose families can’t afford a funeral, or who go unclaimed by relatives. In recent days, though, burial operations have increased from one day a week to five days a week, with around 24 burials each day, said Department of Correction spokesman Jason Kersten.

The coronavirus crisis is taxing New York City’s 911 system like never before. Operators pick up a new call every 15.5 seconds. Panicked voices tell of loved ones in declining health. There are multitudes of cardiac arrests and respiratory failures and others who call needing reassurance that a mere sneeze isn’t a sign they’ve been infected. The system is so overwhelmed, the city has started sending text and tweet alerts urging people to only call 911 “for life-threatening emergencies.” As the city staggered through its deadliest week of the pandemic, its emergency response system and army of operators, dispatchers and ambulance crews were pushed to the brink.

The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus surged past 100,000 Friday as the epidemic in the U.S. cut a widening swath through not just New York City but the entire three-state metropolitan area of 20 million people connected by a tangle of subways, trains and buses. In the bedroom communities across the Hudson River in New Jersey, to the east on Long Island and north to Connecticut, officials were recording some of the worst outbreaks in the country, even as public health authorities expressed optimism that the pace of infections appeared to be slowing. As of Friday, the New York metropolitan area accounted for more than half the nation’s over 18,500 deaths, with other hot spots in places such as Detroit, Louisiana and Washington, D.C.

On Sunday evening, both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Ruvi Rivlin condemned what they called “incitement” against the Chareidi community that had been taking place over the coronavirus outbreak as of late. One anchor on Channel 12 news openly bashed the Chareidi community claiming that the majority of them are against the state and its laws. Netanyahu responded “I strongly condemn the rampant incitement against the Chareidi public, which internalized the danger and the instructions of the Health Ministry,” Netanyahu stated Sunday. “The coronavirus epidemic does not distinguish between Chareidi and secular, between Arabs and Jews. Neither do we. This war is all of ours. Together we will defeat it.

On Sunday evening Interior Minister Aryeh Deri said that a general curfew will be imposed across the entire country of Israel without exception on Seder night, which falls on Wednesday this week. The impetus behind the curfew is an effort to curb Israelis visiting family and friends as a part of the holiday and keep up the national struggle against the coronavirus. “‘The public has to prepare for this scenario,” Deri said during an interview with Channel 12 News. “Those who go out during the holiday in the evening will have to obey the police and return to their homes.” (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)

As an emergency medicine physician in New York City, Dr. Kamini Doobay has always known that death is part of the territory when trying to care for the city’s sickest. But it hasn’t always been like this — patients hit the hardest by the coronavirus, struggling to breathe and on ventilators, with no visitors allowed […]
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States are pulling back the welcome mat for travelers from the New York area, which is the epicenter of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, but some say at least one state’s measures are unconstitutional. Governors in Texas, Florida, Maryland and South Carolina this week ordered people arriving from the New York area —including New Jersey and […]
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