While the US liberals have been cashing on the second wave of Coronavirus outbreak in India to tarnish the global image of the country, the United States has still not been able to dispose of the bodies of Covid-19 patients, who died last year.
On Friday (May 7), the New York Post (NYP) reported that the dead bodies of 750 Coronavirus patients are lying in a refrigerated morgue on the Brooklyn waterfront in New York for more than a year. The bodies were kept in the long-term storage facility that was built in April 2020, when the country was overwhelmed by the early outbreak of the pandemic.
Reportedly, refrigerated vehicles were used when hospitals, morgues and funeral homes in New York were overburdened by the high number of Covid-19 related fatalities. Dina Maniotis, the executive Deputy Commissioner to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, conceded that the storage facilities were meant to be temporary. She told the City Council’s Committee on Health that the family members of the deceased individuals would be notified and briefed about the next plan of action.
Refrigerated trucks were supposed to serve as ‘temporary storage’ space
Maniotis informed that many of them have asked the City Council to bury the deceased on Hard Island, which is New York’s potter’s field (place to bury the unknown). Some family members of the deceased are not in touch with the city council anymore. After learning about the state of mismanagement, Councilman Mark Gjonaj inquired as to why the bodies had not been buried yet. “Why are we delaying that any longer than we have to?” he asked.
Massive surge in ‘unknown’ burials last year during the peak of Covid Crisis in US
Reportedly, the unprecedented step to ‘store’ the dead in refrigerated vehicles had to be taken, keeping in mind the state of the city last year. Around 900 people were buried in the potter’s field in New York during the Coronavirus outbreak last year. Similarly, an emergency morgue set up last year on the 39th Street Pier in Sunset Park neighbourhood had stored more than 1300 dead bodies, including Coronavirus patients. Hart Island, which is the largest public cemetery, witnessed 2666 burials last year as compared to 1200 annually.
US Liberal media sell the story of India’s ‘tragedy porn’, shy away more showcasing its own apathy
Amidst a surging Coronavirus wave, India has become the centre of attention for media all around the world. This has led to wider coverage of India in the worldwide press, focusing on the imagery of the customary Hindu funeral pyre as a way to “shock” their non-Indian audience. After controversial journalist Barkha Dutt was seen reporting from crematoriums, now photographs of tragic funeral pyres, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, have now become valuable commodities, bought and sold in the Western press.
The British-American media company Getty Images now hosts multiple images depicting multiple Indian funeral pyres lit ablaze on their website. From here, any potential media group around the world can buy these images, in three different sizes, with the largest size priced at about Rs. 23,000. While the liberal media have been publishing such images to peddle its anti-India agenda, it has yet not dared to show pictures of 750 dead bodies of Covid-19 patients lying unattended in a morgue in New York.
