The city of New York remembered Sunday night in an emotional ceremony in front of the Brooklyn Bridge to the 30,258 victims of the covid-19 pandemic, the day one year has passed since the first death registered in the city.
We carry the hearts of those we’ve lost — the moms, the dads, the grandparents. All that was great about them lives on in their sons and daughters and grandchildren.
All that was great about every New Yorker we lost lives on in our city. #COVIDMemorial pic.twitter.com/W45a0wN9cz
– Major Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) March 15, 2021
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“We have lost more New Yorkers than in World War II, the Vietnam War, Hurricane Sandy and 9/11 combined. Every family has been affected, and for so many families there is pain, raw pain,” said the Mayor. Bill de Blasio in a virtual ceremony broadcast live, after asking for a minute of silence in honor of the victims.
The increase in tragedy in the city, which during the spring of 2020 was the global epicenter of the pandemic With a number of deaths and hospitalizations that was not registered in any other city in the world at that time, it is more than ten times higher than the deaths caused by the attacks of September 11, 2001.
De Blasio made special mention of the “health heroes” who “saved lives”, sometimes at the cost of his own, and called to remember the good times, adding a phrase in Spanish in his speech: “Whatever happens, no one can take away the dances you’ve had. HHas touched all New Yorkers in one way or another“, citing the Colombian writer and Nobel Prize in Literature, Gabriel García Márquez in the city where a third of the migrants are of Latino origin, one of the most vulnerable groups due to the pandemic.
Relatives of the victims remembered their deceased in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, on which the images of some of those who succumbed to the disease were projected, which devastated neighborhoods such as Queens, Brooklyn o el Bronx.
The ceremony, in which Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious leaders participated, featured the emotional intervention of Carolina Juárez Herández, daughter of a Mexican migrant who lost her father to covid-19, and assured that she remembers her father every time she walks through the places where they shared moments in Harlem.
“My whole family tested positive for COVID,” the young woman said. “To this day I regret not giving him that hug, because I never saw him in person again.”
When she and her mother were discharged from the hospital, her father Francisco Juárez García ended up hospitalized. “I didn’t realize that I couldn’t go with him, I didn’t think of giving him a goodbye hug, I wanted to keep his spirits up, so I just told him ‘We’ll talk later, pa'”, she said excitedly.
There were speeches by religious leaders and a young poet. The ceremony culminated in front of the Brooklyn Bridge with the lively participation of Black Bishop Hezekiah Walker, a popular gospel artist and pastor of the great Brooklyn Love Fellowship Tabernacle church, and his choir. The Love Fellowship.
Advances in the vaccination campaign in New York allow us to see the light at the end of the tunnel for “the city that never sleeps”, which has begun to lift restrictions on businesses, restaurants, sporting events and has reopened schools.
Nearly two million people in New York City have already received at least one dose of the vaccine, although the neighborhoods most affected by the pandemic, those with low income, Latino and black majorities, such as the Bronx, continue to lag behind in the advancement of immunization.
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