TORONTO -- Refrigerator trucks are being deployed to New York City to help store bodies as morgues and funeral homes become overwhelmed with COVID-19 victims.
The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced earlier in the week it’s deploying dozens of mobile morgue sites around New York.
A nurse at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan shared video to her Instagram page showing multiple white refrigerator trucks lining the street near the medical facility.
“If this won’t make you think twice about staying in, then I don’t know what else to say,” the woman wrote in the caption.
More footage taken near the same hospital captured workers building shelves inside one of the refrigerated medical trucks.
A spokesperson for Bellevue Hospital confirmed city health officials had set up the mobile morgue site two blocks from the facility.
As of Friday, the U.S. had recorded more than 245,000 confirmed cases and more than 6,000 deaths related to COVID-19, according to global virus tracking done by Johns Hopkins University.
Nearly 3,000 of those deaths are from New York state alone.