Pentagon Orders 100,000 Body Bags For Coronavirus Victims

The Pentagon is buying 100,000 body bags to store the corpses of Americans killed by the coronavirus.

The body bags will go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which already sent refrigerated trucks to New York in anticipation of a wave of death that overwhelms morgues.

So far, about 5,100 US residents have died, but White House projections predict 100,000 to 240,000 COVID-19 victims, even if social distancing guidelines are maintained.

The military’s Defense Logistics Agency “is currently responding to FEMA’s prudent planning efforts for 100,000 pouches to address mortuary contingencies on behalf of state health agencies,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Andrews said in a statement to Bloomberg News.

“The Department of Defense and the Defense Logistics Agency have a longstanding arrangement with FEMA to procure key commodities from DLA’s industrial partners during crisis response operations,” Andrews said.

The Pentagon has a current stockpile of 50,000 body bags that will be available to FEMA, Bloomberg reports.

In a statement to The Post this week, FEMA spokesman Daniel Llargues said, “FEMA is aware of many states’ planning efforts to account for mortuary contingencies and has increased its posture to support these requests once received from the states.”

He continued: “Prudent planning for these future conditions is taken very seriously by FEMA, and we are working with Regional and State health and emergency managers to ramp up available assets to meet contingency needs for the most affected areas.”

Nationally, more than 210,000 people have been infected by COVID-19 in the largest publicly acknowledged outbreak in the world. Roughly 40 percent of cases are in New York.

[ By New York Post ]