Hart Island

Hart Island (Island, Cemetery, COVID-19/Media Manipulation)
The island was part of a corporate media manipulation campaign during the COVID event, creating an impression of an out-of-control mass death.

Hart Island is located at the western end of Long Island Sound, in the northeastern Bronx in New York City, measuring approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) long by 0.33 miles (0.53 km) wide.

History

The island in 1890.

The island's first public use was as a training ground for the United States Colored Troops in 1864. Since then, Hart Island has been the location of a Union Civil War prison camp, a psychiatric institution, a tuberculosis sanatorium, a pauper mass burial site, a homeless shelter, a boys' reformatory, a jail, and a drug rehabilitation center.

The remains of more than one million people are buried on Hart Island, though since the first decade of the 21st century, there are fewer than 1,500 burials a year. Burials on Hart Island include individuals who were not claimed by their families or did not have private funerals; the homeless and the indigent; and mass burials of disease victims.

COVID-19

The island was part of a corporate media manipulation campaign during the COVID event. In April 2020, drone footage showed mass graves being dug by people in hazmat suits. With phrasings such as "Until now, officials have remained tight-lipped on whether coronavirus victims were being buried on Hart Island.", the impression created by corporate media around the world was of mass death.

What actually happened was that the normal wait time for burying people on Hart Island had been shortened from 30 to 14 days to relieve busy morgues, also struggling with new and time-consuming hygiene regulations. This also gave people less time to claim relatives. Although several media sources reported in April 2020 that burials had begun,New York City mayor Bill de Blasio clarified that Hart Island was only being used to bury unclaimed corpses, as well as the bodies of those who chose it as a burial place. In 2021, the website The City published an analysis that found there was a sharp increase in the number of interments between 2019, when 846 corpses were buried on the island, and 2020, when 2,334 corpses were buried, in a city of 8,4 million people.

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