SANTA MONICA, Calif. (KABC) After a full year since the first known COVID-19 death in the United States, people all over America on Monday remembered the friends, neighbors and family members lost to the disease, in what s become a national day of mourning.
Santa Monica is joining more than 100 other cities to proclaim the first Monday of March as COVID Memorial Day in an effort to make it a national holiday.
Some took the time to remember those individuals lost at the city s Rose River Memorial, which features handmade felt roses from all over Southern California dedicated to those that have died from the virus.
PASSAIC City firefighters, EMTs and workers at St. Mary s Hospital took part Monday in what some are calling a national COVID Memorial Day.
Not yet official, the first Monday in March would become COVID-19 Victims and Survivors Memorial Day under a bill introduced by Rep. Greg Stanton, an Arizona Democrat. This week, Americans mourned half a million lives lost to the coronavirus half a million family members, friends, neighbors and coworkers,” Stanton said in a news release about his bill. “Long after our nation moves beyond this most grim episode, we will need to collectively recognize all those we lost and the aftershocks of what we experienced.”
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100,000 deaths – so how will we commemorate those we have lost to Covid?
From remembrance gardens to Covid Memorial Day, authorities must decide how best to mark Covid s devastating human impact
27 January 2021 • 5:00pm
As death tolls go, 100,000 is hard enough to visualise, let alone comprehend. Imagine the crowds at the main stage at the Glastonbury Festival, or a full Wembley Stadium.
Britain’s growing Covid toll is already of such a magnitude that it will make public commemoration of the dead that much trickier. What monument or artwork could ever do justice to the sheer number of individuals we have lost?
“Give sorrow words,” wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth. “The grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.” One year – and nearly two million deaths – since Chinese officials informed the World Health Organisation of a cluster of cases of “viral pneumonia”, people around the world will be coming together to give their sorrow words.
Today, people around the world will come together for a worldwide day of remembrance for those taken by coronavirus in 2020. It will span 24 time zones, starting in New Zealand and ending in Hawaii.
People are invited to mark the day by lighting a candle, taking a pebble to a hilltop or simply sitting and thinking of those we have lost.