A group of community organizers and faith leaders is taking turns reciting the names of thousands of people who reportedly died of COVID-19.
A number of faith-based organizations, along with progressive groups and politicians, have promoted the vigil on social media.
The vigil participants can’t name all the deceased, but they aim to “read the names of as many people as we can name,” Anthony Torres, an organizer from Brooklyn, New York, told HuffPost.
The group gathered thousands of names by combing through public sources such as “newspapers, unions, faith institutions, [and] government postings,” he said.
Zahara Zahav, a New York-based community organizer with the advocacy group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, said she hopes the recitation of these names helps to humanize the coronavirus death toll figures.