National memorial for Covid-19 victims launched

HYDERABAD: An online national Covid memorial for people who have succumbed to Covid-19 was launched on Saturday, as India officially entered the second year of the pandemic. The first confirmed case in the country was recorded on January 30 last year. The Covid memorial that went live on Saturday will allow family members and friends to write a blog, tell their stories and post photographs of loved ones who have departed.

These will require authentication and are aimed at providing a closure to grieving family members and friends who could not be with the loved ones in their last days. Covid restrictions, including the necessary isolation periods of patients and the lockdown had meant that a lot of people could not spend the last moments with family members. During the initial days of the pandemic, relatives were not even allowed to touch the dead bodies and the last good byes lacked of the basic human dignity in many ways.
Sharing her story of the contracting the virus and living through the dread of living her last days in loneliness, Debra Joseph, a head nurse working in a private hospital in Hyderabad said that this platform could be a hope for people in the situation she was in. “When a person is in isolation and knows that the next is death and that nothing can be done, there is no one with them and they will go down without being able to communicate or share what they feel, this is something will make them feel somebody is there thinking something about them,” she said.
“ We want to send this message to all who have lost almost everything to the deadly virus that we are all with them in agony and they are not alone in grief,” said Dr Abhijit Chowdhury, mentor, Covid Care Network.