Jewish neighborhood deaths up in New York during Covid-19 crisis
Two ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhoods that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic have seen a sharp rise in people dying at home.
New York has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. As of 19 April the Empire State had a total of 247,215 confirmed Covid-19 cases but the curve has flattened for the first time since the outbreak hit the country.
The majority of those cases come from the ultra-Orthodox communities in New York. According to new data analysis the jewish neighborhoods that have reported the most deaths are Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park.
Deaths at home in those neighborhoods in April were more than 10 times higher than during the same period last year, from the analysis of New York City data conducted by the news organization Gothamist.
The analysis found there were 27 fatal cardiac arrest calls to the Fire Department in New York (FDNY) between 1 March and 13 April as opposed to just two during the same period last year. For example, Borough Park has had more than 1,900 confirmed cases, the fourth-highest number of any of the city’s communities.
The analysis provides neighborhood-by-neighborhood insights about a disturbing citywide trend - in addition to the high death toll of confirmed coronavirus patients in the city’s hospitals - that more New Yorkers are dying at home during the health crisis.
That makes those neighborhoods, both home to large populations of ultra-Orthodox Jews, two of the areas with the biggest increases in at-home deaths compared to last year. Other neighborhoods with high at-home death rates are Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, Jamaica and Astoria in Queens, and Washington Heights in Manhattan.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said it is reasonable to assume that most at-home deaths are attributable to Covid-19. Across the city, at-home deaths have increased almost sixfold.