Mass burials as 2000 Americans die each day

It is a scene from a war zone, just kilometres from the heart of ­Manhattan.

Workers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island in the Bronx borough of New York.

It is a scene from a war zone, just kilometres from the heart of ­Manhattan.

Long trenches lined with ­coffins, the final resting places for scores of New Yorkers who have fallen victim to the coronavirus.

Burial operations on Hart Island, a narrow strip of land between The Bronx and Sands Point, used to take place once a week for those whose families couldn’t ­afford a funeral or for bodies that went unclaimed.

Now it’s a five-day-a-week operation as the coronavirus death toll in New York city reached 800 in one 24-hour period.

Medical personnel move a deceased patient to a refrigerated truck serving as make shift morgues at Brooklyn Hospital Center.

The city has been forced to call in more funeral directors to cope with the escalating number of bodies. About 2000 Americans are dying each day of the coronavirus as the crisis ravages the US, despite revised projections of a lower than expected final death toll.

The grim milestone came as another 6.6 million new jobless claims were made in the US last week, meaning 17 million, or about one in 10, American workers have lost jobs in the past three weeks. The number of newly ­unemployed Americans is a third more than the entire Australian workforce.

Medical workers take in patients at a special coronavirus intake area at Maimonides Medical Center. Hospitals in New York City, which has been especially hard hit by the coronavirus, are facing shortages of beds, ventilators and protective equipment for medical staff.

The unprecedented figures show how quickly the US economy has closed up, setting the country on course for an unemployment rate not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The virus epicentre of New York suffered its worst one-day toll yet, with 799 deaths taking the total death toll to 7067 across the state. Governor Andrew Cuomo said: “It’s gotten to the point frankly that we are going to bring in additional funeral directors to deal with the number of people who have passed. If you ever told me that as governor I would have to take these actions, I couldn’t even contemplate where we are now. And to put all this in perspective, I lived through 9/11. (It) was supposed to be the darkest day in New York for a generation.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said this week officials were looking into temporarily burying coronavirus victims on Hart Island if morgues and temporary storage units fill up.

A view of a nearly empty Time Square in New York City. Another 6.6 million US workers filed for unemployment benefits this week.