In the operations center of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on a recent Wednesday, a large dashboard showed that 39 people had died unexpectedly across the city — at home, or accidentally, or violently — over the last 24 hours. That was more than on Sunday, but fewer than the 45 deaths on Monday, almost always the office’s busiest day of the week.
Four years ago, numbers that high would have been a disturbing aberration in the city’s regular pulse of life and death. Today, they are the “new normal,” says Dr. Jason Graham, New York City’s chief medical examiner.
“We were anticipating that as the pandemic waned, our cases would fall back to sort of a prepandemic equilibrium, but they really haven’t,” he said.
