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The New York Times Fills Entire Cover With Names Of Coronavirus Victims In The U.S.

Carla Herreria
·2-min read

When readers across the country pick up a copy of the New York Times on Sunday, they will be confronted with an extraordinarily grim sight.

They will see the names and a peek into the lives of the people who died in the US as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The nearly one thousand obituaries, which fill the entire front page, represent only an estimated 1% of the death toll.

As of Saturday, more than 97,000 people in the US had died from complications with COVID-19.

The victims’ stories were pulled from obituaries published in newspapers across the country.

Simone Landon, the Times’ graphics desk assistant editor, came up with the idea to honour the victims in a way that would allow readers to see the gravity of the pandemic’s impact in the country, according to the paper.

Landon told the Times that there was “a little bit of a fatigue with the data” on deaths in the US, which is being tracked daily by Johns Hopkins University and followed closely by the media.

“We knew we were approaching this milestone,” Landon told the Times. “We knew that there should be some way to try to reckon with that number.”

The shortened obituaries are displayed one after the other and fill six tall columns that stretch across a majority of the Times’ front page.

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In a preview of the paper published Saturday, viewers can zoom in on each name to read about the victims’ lives:

“Lila Fenwick, 87, New York City, first black woman to graduate...

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