If it were zero then postponement wouldn't be an option. When someone dies of Covid 19 do you think the hospital immediately ships them to a funeral parlor? They have a world ending virus, would that be the proper technique or do they hold the body in quarantine for a period of time?
Funerals are being postponed, how many is anyone's guess, be it due to family or funeral parlor backlog from numbers or sick staff.
Funeral postponement is nothing new. It’s not unusual for people to postpone funerals in winter in order to have the burial in spring. As such, the amount of postponements has been consistent with prior years up to this point, meaning there’s not been an appreciable uptick due to COVID-19. Almost everyone has been going forward with burials / cremations because of the uncertainty of when things will open up again. So they’re opting for a small funeral now with a larger memorial service later.
Regardless, the acquisition of trailers is not because of funeral postponement. It is part of the city’s Decedent Recovery Strategy and is done to increase storage capacity at health care facilities. The reason for this is reduce the volume of time-sensitive tasks and help with centrally coordinating activities (i.e., managing ME capacity / workload).
During a pandemic, the ME can easily get overwhelmed managing the activities required to process the deceased. For example, a number of bodies will be loaded into the trailer not having a known identify. Others will be held up at the city morgue because the ME needs a cause of death and doctor’s signature on the death certificate and doctors are tied up treating the massive influx of patients. For others, they’ll be held up because the next of kin is also sick or quarantined and the body can’t be released. There’s a whole host of issues the ME’s office has to manage that have nothing to do with funerals being postponed.
The majority of my in-laws live in NYC, including one who helped work on the ME’s pandemic surge strategy several years ago. My description of what’s happening and why it is happening is based on several conversations with friends and family who are experiencing these things first hand.
That’s the reality of things. COVID-19 is killing significantly more people in New York right now than past flu seasons and it’s not even close. Beyond the makeshift morgues, there’s a Navy hospital ship, 4 military field hospitals, a Samaritan’s Purse field hospital, a field hospital in the Javits Center and another nursing home that’s been converted to a hospital and they still may need more. These things don’t happen with the flu and that’s the reason for the coverage.
