Dead bodies are loaded into refrigerated trucks outside New York hospitals as 98 people died in SEVEN hours

Horrifying footage has emerged of dead bodies being loaded onto a refrigerated lorry with a forklift outside Brooklyn Hospital in New York City where 790 people have died from coronavirus and 36,000 have been infected.

THE video – which was taken by a bystander from their car – shows the bodies being loaded onto a vehicle. It surfaced within hours of a nurse sharing a harrowing photograph of bodies that had been piled into a refrigerated lorry to be taken away from a different hospital.

There are makeshift morgues and hospitals popping up all over New York City, the epicentre of the virus in the US, including one in Central Park.

As of Monday morning, there were 142,000 cases of coronavirus in the US and 2,500 people had died.

New York City is expecting its ‘peak’ in the next few weeks and there is a frantic race against time to prepare the already inundated hospital system for it when it comes.

While it is the epicentre now, experts including the White House’s most authoritative voice on the subject – Dr Anthony Fauci –  say other cities will soon experience similarly distressing outbreaks.

New Orleans is expected to be the next hotspot – it currently has 1,350 cases and 73 deaths – but Fauci said on Monday he was also worried about Detroit and Los Angeles.

The president has extended social distancing guidelines until the end of April and gave the grim prediction on Sunday that if the death toll remains under 200,000 by the time the pandemic is over, he will have done a ‘good job.’

The last time that New York City deployed a fleet of makeshift morgues outside hospitals was in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The virus and the disease it causes, Covid-19, has torn through New York with frightening speed.

Americans are now being called on to prepare for another 30 days of severe economic and social disruption, as schools and businesses are closed and public life is upended.

One in three Americans remain under state or local government orders to stay at home to slow the spread of the virus.

Trump acknowledged that he may be forced to extend the guidelines again at the end of April, but expressed hope that by June 1, ‘We should be well on our way to recovery.’