Last Sunday marked one year since the first person died from COVID in New York City.
Mayor Bill de Blasio hosted "A COVID-19 Day of Remembrance" memorial ceremony to honour the 30,000 New Yorkers who died during the pandemic.
"Every morning, the first thing I see is a list and there are numbers on it, but what it really means is how many people we lost, how many New Yorkers are gone, how many neighbors, how many members of our family...Today, that number is more than 30,000. It's a number we can barely imagine. More New Yorkers lost than in World War II, Vietnam, Hurricane Sandy, and 9/11 put together," de Blasio said, as quoted by ABC7 NY.
During WWI, the US lost an estimated 116,516 people; during WWII, the country lost more than 405,000 people – its deadliest conflict. The Korean War of 1950-1953 resulted in the deaths of 36,574 US citizens. The Vietnam War took the lives of 58,000 Americans. Next came the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of more than 7,000 Americans.
The coronavirus pandemic has already killed 534,099 people across the US.
