Police were called to a funeral home in New York after a bad smell coming from the street outside turned out to be from hundreds of bodies kept inside trucks.
The Andrew T. Cleckley funeral home in Brooklyn resorted to keeping the bodies on ice in the trucks after running out of space to store them following a huge rise in deaths due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The four trucks were storing around 50 bodies each, an anonymous city official told the Associated Press.
No criminal charges were brought and the funeral home was reportedly told to get a bigger truck to store the bodies in, and warned about controlling the smell.
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The Standard has contacted the funeral home for comment.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams told the Daily News: “While this situation is under investigation, we should not have what we have right now, with trucks lining the streets filled with bodies.”
New York is one of the worst-hit cities in the world by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The city has had more than 160,000 confirmed cases and around 18,000 people have died after contracting the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the global spread of the virus.
Brooklyn has had more than 3,500 deaths alone, second only to Queens in New York for coronavirus-related fatalities.
New York has struggled to handle its big increase in deaths. The city set up 45 mobile morgues at the start of April to manage the problem but demand has increased even further since then.
Patrick J. Kearns, a local funeral director, told the New York Times: "When you overwhelm the health system, you also overwhelm the death system."
