In the early days of the pandemic, Alex Goldstein watched as the coronavirus death toll rose, growing increasingly concerned that those who died were not being remembered as they should.
“I found myself being really quickly overwhelmed with the data and statistics of deaths and hospitalizations and ventilators and ‘flatten the curve,'" Goldstein said. “And that was such an important part of the story, but it felt like it was lacking the human component of this loss that was just cascading over us.”
In late March of 2020, he created the @FacesOfCOVID Twitter account. Each day, he combed through news stories, obituaries and individual submissions from family and friends who had lost a loved one. And from those, he crafted posts that aimed to put a face and name to the statistics.
Nearly a full year since he began the project, more than 525,000 people have died from COVID-19 across the nation. And each day, Goldstein continues to post with the goal of not only sharing some of those stories with others but also helping mourners to feel less alone in a time of tremendous isolation.
“All of the normal sort of communal things we do to say goodbye to a loved one — the funeral and the wake and the memorial services and just having people bring us food and sit with us and cry with us — that has all been deferred this entire year, 525,000 times,” Goldstein said. “I think that what people are looking for is just some kind of public acknowledgment that we’ve lost something.”
While he first started the project to help others, Goldstein said that it has had an enormous impact on him personally, too.
"It’s been one of the most meaningful rituals of my entire life," he said. "It’s the last thing I do before I go to sleep and the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning. And it’s a sacred space to be able to provide this opportunity for families to put their loved ones forward and to be in the embrace of strangers who say, 'I didn’t know your loved one. But the fact that they’re not here harms all of us, and I’m sorry.'"
