NYC's real death toll from COVID-19 higher than it shows

New York City experienced a deadly week at the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, as total fatalities surpassed 5,800 by Friday evening local time, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

However, the official figure is believed to be an undercount as those who died at home or on the street before they got tested for the coronavirus were left out, local officials and media said.

Local news channel NY1 on Tuesday analyzed a set of data provided by the Fire Department of New York, which showed that 241 people died at home on April 5 after calling the department for medical service, compared with 29 on the same day last year.

It remained unclear how many among the 241 deceased cases were related to COVID-19. Nevertheless, the city only reported 184 coronavirus deaths for the day, according to the channel.

Mark Levine, chair of the NYC Council Committee on Health, said earlier this week that normally 20 to 25 people die at home on a daily basis in the city, while the number now is at 200-215 every day.

"For sure nearly all the increase is people with coronavirus. But not all are being counted that way," he tweeted.

"Only people who die at home who are known to have a 'positive coronavirus test' have the disease listed as the official cause on their death certificate. We know there are many others going uncounted," he continued.

According Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the commissioner of New York City's Department of Health, the city's COVID-19 death count reflects those who had tested positive for the virus and died in the hospital or at home.

But not all those infected or with suspected infections are able to get tested, despite the fact that the testing capacity has been expanded significantly in New York State in the past month.

Speaking at a briefing last Friday, Barbot said the city is not conducting contact tracing as recommended by the World Health Organization to find more COVID-19 positive patients.

She said the city is now in the phase of mitigation instead of containment, and contact tracing is "not a good use of our resources" as hundreds, if not thousands of new cases, are reported every day.

The surge of deaths has overwhelmed local funeral homes while making city agencies scramble to find more burial sites.

On Friday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted that some of the COVID-19 victims are buried on Hart Island in the northeastern Bronx in New York City.

Since the 19th century, the island has been a place for burying New Yorkers whose bodies were not claimed by their families or did not have private funerals.

"The pictures of our fellow New Yorkers being buried on Hart Island are devastating for all of us," de Blasio tweeted, referring to videos circulating online lately taken by drones.

"The heartbreaking numbers of deaths we're seeing means we are sadly losing more people without family or friends to bury them privately," the mayor tweeted.

"Those are the people who will be buried on Hart Island, with every measure of respect and dignity New York City can provide," he continued.

After being asked about the issue at his daily briefing later on Friday, de Blasio said the bodies being sent to the Island are those who "no one, after a period of time, has claimed them, and not just COVID victims but victims for all diseases, for all reasons of fatality."

"But if at any point a family member returns or shows up, the body will be given to the family as we would always want to do," he said.