NEW York prisoners could be tasked with digging mass graves to bury coronavirus victims if the outbreak becomes a severe pandemic.

Plans drawn up by the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner in 2008 details how inmates at Rikers Island would be used to dispose of up to 5,000 bodies a day if the spread became out-of-control.

The report titled ‘Pandemic Influenza Surge Plan For Managing In- and Out-of-Hospital Deaths’ lays out what would happen during an emergency on the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu and the 1957 Asian Flu.

It says that NYC would deploy death professionals such as morticians and forensic photographers to collect the bodies.

According to New York magazine, they would be asked to shift between 50 and 5,000 corpses per day if the mortality rate was 2.1 per cent or above.

PANDEMIC PLANS

More than 500,000 Americans were killed by the Spanish Flu.

The report says authorities would deploy mobile fridge units around the city capable of holding 44 bodies each.

An acceleration in the cremation of bodies would be needed to deal with the huge amount of corpses.

And if the number of bodies reached overflow, then excess cadavers would be sent to Hart Island – located in the western Long Island Sound near the Northeast edge of the Bronx.

It is the largest public burial ground in the United States.

Inmates from nearby Rikers Island would be tasked with digging mass graves and burying the remains of the virus victims.

MASS GRAVES

The report says that up to 70 per cent of deaths from a pandemic would occur in hospitals and retirement homes.

There are currently 755 cases of coronavirus in the US – and 26 people have died – after the outbreak started at a food market in Wuhan, China, before spreading around the world.

New York has seen cases rise rapidly to 142.

Where have cases of coronavirus been confirmed in the US?

More than 114,800 people have been infected by the coronavirus across the world and 4,026 have died, according to a Reuters tally.

Infections outside China have now been reported by 111 countries.

In the US, there have been "at least 728 cases and 26 deaths across 36 states and the District of Columbia as of 1am ET on March 10", reports CNN.

Of that total, 658 sufferers were diagnosed with the bug via the public health system, and 70 others were mostly holidaymakers repatriated to America.

A breakdown of that figure shows that 46 were repatriated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship – a luxury cruise vessel which was quarantined at the port of Yokohama, and was evacuated last month.

A further 21 patients – mostly crew – were travelling on the Grand Princess cruise ship, which on Monday sailed into San Francisco Bay en route to the Port of Oakland for treatment and quarantine.

Washington state has reported the most cases – 180 so far, including 22 deaths.

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