The Body Collectors of the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New Yorker

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The Body Collectors of the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New Yorker Posted: 22 Apr 2020 09:32 AM PDT The dead man's nurse was waiting in the hallway when Kim Zambito and Al Johnson stepped off the elevator on the third floor of an apartment building in Midwood, Brooklyn. The sight of them startled her. Zambito and Johnson wore surgical masks, body-length plastic protective gowns, and thick blue gloves. A stretcher rattled behind them. The body was visible through the apartment's open door. A long interior hallway, cluttered with cardboard boxes and shoes, led to the bathroom, where a man in a striped button-down shirt and gray cardigan was lying face down on the floor. He was seventy-one and, according to the nurse, had been having trouble breathing. Several hours had passed since she found him there, she said. His mouth was still open. Funeral directors making house calls have to treat each new death as a potential case of COVID-19. "We don't want anything escaping his lungs when we turn him over," Zambito said. Johnson tucked a tissue between the man's lips and covered his face with a sheet. They gently rolled him over. Zambito peeled off one of the three pairs of gloves she was wearing, and let them fall to the floor; she then reached for her cell phone in the back pocket of her jeans. Typically, a detective from the police department is required to inspect a body in person, to rule out foul play, but all of them were busy on other calls. A police officer who was waiting downstairs had asked Zambito to take a photograph of the body instead. Zambito sprayed everything she planned to touch with disinfectant. Because the apartment's hallway was too narrow to accommodate the stretcher, she and Johnson slid a clear plastic pouch onto the floor of the bathroom. They angled the body into the bag and zipped it shut. With Zambito holding the legs and Johnson lifting the torso, they carried the man to the stretcher. Prior to the pandemic, Zambito later told me, she found some solace in knowing that a person's family and friends would have another chance to say goodbye at the funeral home. "With COVID victims, it feels like shit, because this is the last time anyone is going to see them," she said. "If they're COVID-positive, we'll have to immediately casket them. You're walking out the door with someone's loved one, and you're taking them away forever." It was 5 p.m. on April 8th. This was the sixth body that Zambito and Johnson had picked up that day, and there were still three more retrievals to do—two house calls and a trip to Maimonides Hospital. In the first six weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City, the death toll surpassed that of not just every American city but also that of many other countries worldwide. More than thirty-three New Yorkers were dying every hour from COVID-19, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo. Still, the statistics only captured a part of the over-all devastation. Earlier this month, when Cuomo announced eight hundred deaths on a single day in New York City, he was relying on figures from hospitals, which only included people who had tested positive for COVID-19. But, in just the first eight days of April, the office of the city medical examiner recorded 1,891 deaths in people's homes. The day before Zambito visited the apartment in Midwood, the city's emergency medical services logged two hundred and fifty-six home deaths across the city, compared with a rate of roughly twenty-five such deaths per day in March. Kim Zambito in the courtyard of Sherman's Flatbush Memorial Chapel. Zambito, who is twenty-nine, grew up on Staten Island. She used to tell her high-school guidance counsellors that she planned to be a mortician just to get them off her back. "It creeped them out," she said. "But I kind of wanted to do it, too." She went on to attend St. John's University, which she was surprised to learn offered a bachelor's degree in funeral-service administration. "It was, like, Oh, this actually is something I can do," she recalled. "And then, when I saw my first dead body, I didn't throw up." Zambito began her career at a trade house, which performed removals for funeral homes in New York City and New Jersey. Two years ago, she took a job in Midwood, at two funeral homes that shared an office and staff: Sherman's Flatbush Memorial Chapel, which served a mainly Jewish clientele, and Lisovetsky Memorial Home, which catered to Russian customers. It didn't matter to Zambito which faith or ethnicity she was dealing with; preparing people for their last rites, and helping families to find some measure of closure, she told me, was meaningful work. "It made you feel like you were doing something for someone." Lately, though, the job has changed. She used to pick up, at most, two bodies a day, and when she went to the hospital morgue she made a habit of offering her condolences to the family; orderlies would help her carry the body to the car. Now hospital morgues have so many bodies that they've been storing them outside, in refrigerated trailers, and employees are under strict orders to avoid prolonged contact with the infected corpses. Every morning around seven-thirty, Zambito arrives at work to find that six or seven new cases have been called in overnight. They have been taking her to Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and each body appears to have some connection to COVID-19. "You look at a death certificate, and it might not say coronavirus," she told me. "But you look at it and you see pneumonia or respiratory failure listed as the cause of death. Where are all the regular deaths? Where's cancer? Where's heart disease? All of a sudden, I'm only seeing people dying of pneumonia." In Midwood, Zambito and Johnson brought the body out to their van, but they couldn't leave until a detective inspected the photo that Zambito had taken. The police officer had begun pacing the sidewalk, trying to get a detective on the phone. An hour passed. Although the unprecedented caseload had Zambito feeling more rushed than ever, increasingly, she found herself waiting aimlessly on the job. To maintain social distancing, funeral directors were no longer allowed to enter the office of the Brooklyn Medical Examiner, which meant that she often spent more than an hour sitting in a caravan of cars in the parking lot. It might be several hours before a medical investigator could find a doctor to sign a death certificate and then complete the file on the deceased. Bodies were hard to locate in the chaotic refrigeration units of beleaguered hospital morgues. And the city-wide electronic system for generating and recording death certificates, called eVital, kept freezing from overuse. When a detective finally called back, the officer put him on speakerphone. Zambito and Johnson were sitting in the car, with the windows down. They craned their necks to listen. "You're good to go," the detective said. "Natural causes."

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