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COVID’s forgotten victims: How the pandemic failed to redefine obituaries

Leading obituary writers discuss who gets to be publicly memorialised in death – and who doesn’t

By Rashmee Roshan Lall
COVID’s forgotten victims: How the pandemic failed to redefine obituaries
The New York Times on Sunday 24 May 2020 prints the names of 1,000 US victims of COVID, as the country's pandemic death toll neared 100,000 | Richard Levine / Alamy Stock Photo
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After two years of COVID and a global death toll of more than six million, the pandemic has revealed a stark truth: death is the great leveller.

But this much hasn’t been clear from the obituary pages of news outlets around the world, which have mostly documented the pandemic-related passings of only the rich and famous.

In death as in life, the poor – on whom the pandemic has taken the greatest toll – remain mostly unseen.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0