Healthcare
NYC Official Says City Is Preparing To Dig ‘Trenches’ In A Park To Bury The Dead
Updated
The Chair of the New York City Council’s health committee Mark D. Levine said Monday that the city is overwhelmed by the number of deaths from the coronavirus and that they’re preparing to dig “trenches” in a city park to bury the dead.
Read Levine’s Twitter thread below:
NYC’s “city morgue” is the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), which luckily is the best in the world.
But they are now dealing w/ the equivalent of an ongoing 9/11. And so are hospital morgues, funeral homes & cemeteries.
Every part of this system is now backed up. 2/
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020
Grieving families report calling as many as half a dozen funeral homes and finding none that can handle their deceased loved ones.
Cemeteries are not able to handle the number of burial requests and are turning most down. 4/
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020
Early on in this crisis we were able to swab people who died at home, and thus got a coronavirus reading. But those days are long gone. We simply don't have the testing capacity for the large numbers dying at home. 6/
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020
And still the number of bodies continues to increase. The freezers at OCME facilities in Manhattan and Brooklyn will soon be full. And then what? 8/
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020
The goal is to avoid scenes like those in Italy, where the military was forced to collect bodies from churches and even off the streets.
OCME is going to need much more staff to achieve that goal. 10/
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020
As New York City continues to appeal to the nation for help, we need to ask not just for doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists. We also need mortuary affairs staff. This is tough to talk about and maybe tough to ask for. But we have no choice. The stakes are too high. 12/
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020
To recap: Nothing matters more in this crisis than saving the living. But we need to face the gruesome reality that we need more resources to manage our dead as well. Or the pain of this crisis will be compounded almost beyond comprehension. 13/13
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020
As of Monday, the virus has killed 4,159 in the state. The number of daily deaths fell for the first time Sunday when 594 deaths were reported, compared to the previous day where there were 630 deaths.
“You could argue that you’re seeing a slight plateauing in the data, which obviously would be good news,” NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday, calling the promising data a potential “blip.”
The number of coronavirus patients in the hospitals and ICUs continues to climb. Moreover, the number of deaths in the city, alone, increased to 351 on Sunday.
COVID-19
Former Harvard medical professor says he was fired for opposing Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates
“My hope is that someday, Harvard will find its way back to academic freedom and independence.” That is the heartfelt message from Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard University professor of medicine since 2003, who recently announced publicly he was fired for “clinging to the truth” in his opposition to Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Kulldorff posted the news on social media alongside an essay published in the City Journal last week. The epidemiologist and biostatistician also spoke with National Review about the incident. Kulldorff says he was fired by the Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham hospital system and put on a leave of absence by Harvard Medical School in November 2021 over his stance on Covid.
Nearly two years later, in October 2023, his leave of absence was terminated as a matter of policy, marking the end of his time at the university. Harvard severed ties with Kulldorff “all on their initiative,” he said.
The history of the medical professional’s public stance on Covid-19 vaccines and mandates is detailed by National Review:
Censorship and rejection led Kulldorff to co-author the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 alongside Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University. Together, the three public-health scientists argued for limited and targeted Covid-19 restrictions that “protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives,” as Kulldorff put it in his essay.
“The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous,” he wrote, naming former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins as the one who ordered a “devastating published takedown” of the declaration.
Testifying before Congress in January, Collins reaffirmed his previous statements attacking the Great Barrington Declaration.
Despite the coordinated effort against it, the document has over 939,000 signatures in favor of age-based focused protection.
The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors, who advocated the quick reopening of schools, have been vindicated by recent studies that confirm pandemic-era school closures were, in fact, detrimental to student learning. The data show that students from third through eighth grade who spent most of the 2020–21 school year in remote learning fell more than half a grade behind in math scores on average, while those who attended school in person dropped a little over a third of a grade, according to a New York Times review of existing studies. In addition to learning losses, school closures did very little to stop the spread of Covid, studies show.
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