As coronavirus victims overwhelm New York funeral homes, traditions are delayed and denied
- Funeral workers have become frontline responders struggling to give comfort to mourning families
- The city’s mortality rate is finally falling but its experience is likely to be repeated across the US as numbers rise elsewhere
These days, as Wilson Mak drifts off to sleep after another 14-hour day at a New York funeral home, images of Covid-19 victims flash through his mind.
“When I close my eyes, I still see those ugly sights,” says Mak, manager of Ng Fook Funeral Services in New York City. “It’s unbearable.”
Ng Fook’s four funeral homes in the city’s various Chinese communities are a microcosm of an overwhelmed industry as corpses pile up in hallways, trucks and makeshift morgues across hotspots of the disease in the US.
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Still, the bodies keep coming. “The cemeteries, the crematoriums, they’re all backed up. The hospitals don’t want to keep them. We’re stuck in the middle,” says Mak, who was born in Hong Kong. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life and still can’t get it done.”
Covid-19 has infected more than 1.2 million Americans and killed more than 73,000, exposing the deadly cost of White House mismanagement, a fractured health care system and political pressure to reopen the economy.