New York funeral home puts corpses in lorries: Report

A funeral home in in New York, the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, put dozens of bodies in moving lorries  authorities have said, after passersby complained of the smell.

The Andrew T Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn had rented trucks and put about 50 corpses inside with ice, the BBC reported on Thursday.

It is however, unclear if these were victims of the coronavirus.

Eric Adams, the Borough President of Brooklyn, went to the scene after the funeral home complaint emerged.

"While this situation is under investigation, we should not have what we have right now, with trucks lining the streets filled with bodies," the BBC quoted Adams saying to the New York Daily News on Wednesday.

Adams said they were alerted by "people who walked by who saw some leakage and detected an odour coming from a truck".

By law, funeral directors must keep bodies in safe conditions that prevent infection before they are buried or cremated.

Police were called to the scene and sealed off the area, while a refrigerated truck later arrived.

In a briefing on Wednesday, Governor Andrew Cuomo said that with 4,585 additional cases, the state's overall tally reached 299,691, and the daily death toll fell to 330, the lowest since early March.

The US currently accounts for the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world, as well as deaths.

As of Thursday morning, the country recorded 1,039,909 cases, with 60,966 deaths, according to the latest tally by the Johns Hopkins University.