Covid-19 is helping wealthy countries talk about death

UNTIL THIS year many New Yorkers had never heard of Hart Island, where the city’s unclaimed dead are buried. Then, in the midst of the pandemic, video of contractors digging long trenches there went viral. Around 120 bodies were sent to the tiny islet every week, as burial grounds and crematoriums struggled to keep pace with covid-19. One funeral home in Brooklyn was sued for stacking bodies in an unrefrigerated rental truck. At the peak of the epidemic Sal Farenga, an undertaker in the Bronx, was doing three times as many funerals as usual and turning away 50 grieving families a day. “It was heartbreaking,” Mr Farenga says.