Dead are buried on New York City’s Hart Island amid coronavirus surge

New York City officials have hired contract laborers to bury the dead in its potter’s field on Hart Island as the city’s daily death rate from the coronavirus epidemic has reached grim new records in each of the last three days. Since the 19th century, the city has used Hart Island to bury New Yorkers with no known next of kin or whose family are unable to arrange a funeral. Typically, some 25 bodies are interred each week by low-paid jail inmates working on the island, which sits off the east shore of th