New York City officials have hired contract laborers to bury the dead in its potter's field on Hart Island as the city's daily death rate from the coronavirus epidemic has reached grim new records in each of the last three days.
The city has used Hart Island to bury New Yorkers with no known next of kin or whose family are unable to arrange a funeral since the 19th century.
There are about two dozen bodies a day, five days a week buried on the island, said Jason Kersten, a spokesman for the Department of Correction, which oversees the burials.