A Digital Memorial for American COVID Victims

Five years ago, the COVID pandemic took hold of the world. COVID has largely disappeared from the news, yet approximately 2,000 Americans still die prematurely each week from this preventable infectious disease.¹

During the first year of the pandemic, I tried to visualize what half of that number — 1,000 Americans — really meant. When this number accounted for 1% of the total death toll, The New York Times highlighted these individuals in U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss on May 24, 2020. The purpose of this front page was to showcase the scale and diversity of the tragedy. With the same goal, I attempted to create a permanent memorial by adding data about these individuals to Wikidata.

Eighty people from this list have their own Wikipedia article. About a quarter of these articles were written after I imported the data from the NYT article. Without this data collection, some individuals on this list would likely have gone completely unnoticed. In the case of Emma Weigley, I am almost certain. The article on Sterling Maddox, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates from 1970 to 1974, was written by me.

Visualizing the Collected Data

The primary goal of Wikidata is to connect all language versions of Wikipedia. To achieve this, the project has the modest task of being a data model that interlinks all concepts in the world. It does this by making links between concepts, such as a person and their nationality. Within this fabric, this group will now always be preserved.

By scraping Legacy.com, just like the New York Times had, I was able to add a place of birth to 62% of these people:

Reading individual death notices led to more detailed additions. For example, 85 people now have a photo, often from high school yearbooks. Sometimes the item about this school still had to be created. Usually I can convert the data about a person into a data model in about fifteen minutes, but if the item about the school someone attended or the cemetery where they are buried does not yet exist in Wikidata, that can add up.

To date, 66 individuals have had their burial locations documented.

Nearly 1% were such loyal fans of a sports team that this was mentioned in the obituary.

For some individuals, I was even able to document physical characteristics such as height. The tallest person in this set with a recorded height is 203 cm (6’8″), Cedric Dixon (Q95887469), a New York detective who passed away at the age of 48. The shortest is artist Geraldine Marie McGovern (Q95889730), at 147 cm (4’10”).² So far, I have also been able to document that about 1% of these individuals played a musical instrument. Most often, this is “the human voice,” because this can be inferred from a membership in a church choir. Among them, 90-year-old Pierina D. Borsoi (Q95880258) is one of the few individuals known to have played the kazoo.

In 70% of cases, an occupation has now been registered. That is probably also approximately the percentage whose obituary I have now read.

Family connections

With Wikidata, you can also document family relationships. This makes it possible to identify that there are seven elderly couples in this set.³ The couple Rachel and Jimmy Walters (Q95884422 and Q95884799) also had a son, 48-year-old Davis Begaye (Q95886894), who appears in the list. All three were members of the Navajo.⁴ The family relationships I have been able to find between people in this set and individuals in Wikipedia are also documented in the Wikipedia article about this NYT article, which was primarily written by me.

When recording a woman’s last name, you can add a qualifier to indicate whether it is a maiden or married name. If a marriage date is mentioned, I enter it as the start date when this married name came into use. While entering data, I did not initially notice that the obituary of hospital volunteer Beverly J. Collins (Q95883663) is likely incorrect. It states that a 55-year marriage ended in 2003 when her husband passed away. Since Beverly was born in 1936, this would mean she married at the age of 12.⁵

The woman who most recently took on a married name was Jermaine Ferro (Q95886781). She had been married for just a year when she and her husband were exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus during an anniversary trip in February 2020.⁶ She was also the first resident of Florida to die from the virus.⁷ So far, I have identified 11 individuals in this set who have been reported in the media as the first person to die of COVID-19 in their state or county.⁸ The first American for whom this was officially determined as the cause of death is also mentioned. That was 57-year-old Patricia Dowd (Q95880350), who passed away on February 6.⁹

An Ongoing Project

Although I started this project nearly five years ago, it is not yet complete. I rarely work on it now and focus more on smaller projects, such as the data model of the “Role Model” music video.

In my report on Wikimania 2025, I explain how you can retrieve data from Wikidata without tech skills by asking ChatGPT to generate a SPARQL query. The individuals on this list are grouped based on the fact that they all share the property ‘described by source’ (P1343) = ‘U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss‘ (Q95431705).

I’m hopeful eventually 1% of this 1% will have an article written about them, and that this will happen before I hope the WHO declares the COVID-19 pandemic over. With no current measures in place to prevent transmission, this will likely only occur after the approval and rollout of a nasal vaccine.¹⁰ Until then, I strongly recommend wearing an N95 mask on public transportation to help prevent severe damage to the heart and brain.^{11 12}

Footnotes

1. Track Covid-19 in the U.S., New York Times retrieved March 4, 2025 ↩︎
2. People listed “U.S. deaths Near 100.000, an incalculable loss” by height ↩︎
3. Spouses in “U.S. deaths Near 100.000, an incalculable loss” ↩︎
4. ‘It’s heartbreaking’: Navajo Nation family loses parents, brother due to coronavirus Farmington Daily (8 mei 2020) ↩︎
5. Obituary Beverly J. Collins, retrieved March 4, 2025 ↩︎
6. Montoya, Melissa Their love story spans a lifetime, but COVID-19 undid it all News-Press (May 8, 2020) ↩︎
7. Gluck, Frank Gulf Coast Medical Center, site of Florida’s first COVID-19 death, marks one-year anniversary of pandemic News-Press (March 5, 2021) ↩︎
8. People with a “index of” statement and are described in “U.S. deaths Near 100.000, an incalculable loss” ↩︎
9. DeBolt, David; Peele, Thomas Coronavirus: First known victim in U.S. died of “burst” heart, pathologist says The Mercury News (April 26, 2020) ↩︎
10. Schneider, Tamara Nasal COVID-19 vaccine halts transmission WashU Medicine (July 31, 2024) ↩︎
11. Gale, Jason What We Know About Covid’s Impact on Your Brain Bloomberg (March 3, 2025) ↩︎
12. Gale, Jason What We’re Learning About Covid’s Scary Impact on Hearts: Prognosis Bloomberg (March 11 , 2024) ↩︎