The Covid Memorial Wall

The National Covid Memorial Wall has been painted over the last month by volunteers along the South Bank of the Thames between Lambeth Bridge and Westminster Bridge, opposite the Houses of Parliament, and including the riverside wall in front of St Thomas' Hospital. There are around 150,000 hearts, each representing one of the UK Covid dead (so far) and many of them dedicated to named individuals. This unofficial memorial was started by people involved with Covid-19 Bereaved Families For Justice UK.

It is hard to do justice to the scale of this monument in photographs, stretching as it does for around 500 metres. I strongly recommend that if you get the chance you visit it yourself.

Harder too to keep a dry eye as you read the names and messages on the wall, and feel a rising sense of sadness and anger.

The impact of Covid is so often rendered as a series of statistics in which the individual lives lost and damaged are rendered invisible, the wall places these lives back at the centre - mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, lovers and friends.

'The UK has one of the highest death tolls in the world. While many have become used to seeing the statistics associated with Covid-19, it is important to remember that each one of these numbers represents a loved person, a life gone too soon and a family torn apart. Our loved ones were not just numbers, but treasured relatives who will be missed forever.

As more and more information comes to light, it has become clear that the UK hasn’t ended up with one of the highest death tolls in the world by coincidence. Gaps in the country’s pandemic preparedness, delays to locking down, inadequate supplies of PPE and the policy of discharging into care homes among other issues have all been identified as having contributed to the level of the death toll. Despite this, the government continues to refer to its ‘apparent success’ and being ‘proud’ of its record. Not only is this deeply hurtful for bereaved families who have already gone through a traumatic loss to hear, but this reluctance to engage honestly with what has gone wrong is a barrier to learning. Every day the government fails to learn lessons, more families are going through the same loss and trauma. It is heart breaking to see the same mistakes repeated over and over'

(Covid 19 Bereaved Families for Justice)

Most of the names on the memorial are of UK dead but good to see acknowledgement too of the global dimension of the pandemic including a heart for Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who was one of the first to raise the alarm about Covid.

'When politicians and experts say that they are willing to allow tens of thousands of premature deaths for the sake of population immunity or in the hope of propping up the economy, is that not premeditated and reckless indifference to human life? If policy failures lead to recurrent and mistimed lockdowns, who is responsible for the resulting non-covid excess deaths? When politicians wilfully neglect scientific advice, international and historical experience, and their own alarming statistics and modelling because to act goes against their political strategy or ideology, is that lawful? Is inaction, action? How big an omission is not acting immediately after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020? At the very least, covid-19 might be classified as “social murder”'

(Kamran Abbasi, Covid-19: Social murder, they wrote—elected, unaccountable, and unrepentant, British Medical Journal editorial, 4 February 2021)