On Friday, US officials confirmed that people who died from an unclaimed Coronavirus were buried in unmarked mass graves on Hart Island, New York, by workers contracted specifically for this task.
The New York authorities used the site 150 years ago to bury the abandoned and unclaimed bodies, or the bodies of the state's residents whose relatives were unable to secure the cost of the funeral and burial.
"We will continue to use the island this way during the crisis, and it is likely that people who died of Covid-19 and who meet the conditions will be buried on the island in the coming days," said a spokesman for the city government.
The New York Times reported that about 25 people are buried on the island of Hart a day since the outbreak of the new Corona virus began last month, while such a number was buried a week earlier.
New York recorded 160,000 cases of coronavirus, more than any country outside the United States, including those most affected in Europe such as Spain and Italy, and the number of deaths in the state 7,844, accounting for about half of the deaths in the United States.
Hart Island - which is one mile long and located in the Bronx - was bought by the city from a landowner in 1869 and turned it into a cemetery to bury the unknown and the poor, and is one of the largest public graves in New York, where about a million bodies are buried there.
And 1200 bodies are buried on this island every year, where the bodies are placed in coffins made of pine in trenches, and there are no tombstones, but only small white marks that indicate the trenches.
Hart Island was also used to bury AIDS victims over the years, as well as a prison during the American Civil War and a clinic for mental illnesses, tuberculosis patients and even a missile base during the Cold War era, often referred to as the "Island of the Dead" in New York.