Waltham Man Puts Human Face To Coronavirus Death Toll

WALTHAM, MA — When the coronavirus shut down much of the state and death statistics began to take over headlines, one Waltham resident began to share local news stories he saw that highlighted the lives of those who had died.

Seeing the daily numbers, Alex Goldstein said he could feel himself go numb at the expanse of it all. So Goldstein said he felt compelled to highlight the lives who were lost by retweeting stories about them on Twitter.

"I was constantly bombarding people with them," Goldstein said. "Fairly quickly, I realized I needed to allow people to opt into that."

So he set up a separate Twitter account and called it @FacesOfCOVID.

"Treating those stats as an abstraction without connecting to real people felt like a disservice to the people we were losing," he said. "And, to be honest, to tell and share those stories was cathartic."

He started dedicating early mornings and late nights to retweeting news articles profiling people who had died, pulling out little facts about them to highlight. He would also look through obituaries for those that noted the person's death was related to the virus. He was not short on material.

More than 200,000 across the U.S. have died as a result of the virus. In Massachusetts alone, the number of people who have died because of the coronavirus reached at 9,317 as of Tuesday.

When he began in mid-March, Goldstein had no idea how many people would be interested in what he was doing. At one point in April, he and his friend Scott Zoback, who lived in Brookline at the time, were tag-teaming posts, highlighting people who had died every 30 minutes.

It struck a chord

Just six months in, and with no plans to stop, the duo have highlighted more than 2,700 people across the country who have died because of the coronavirus. That works out to about 14 people per day.

Some 71,500 people follow the account.

"We never envisioned that the platform was going to get so big," he said.

Goldstein, who grew up in Newton and graduated from Brandeis University, spent a decade working as a spokesperson for Gov. Deval Patrick's administration, he regards the stories of so many lives lost as a memorial that shows what he sees as a systemic failure to address the pandemic ("It's a reflection of a massive policy failure.").

But the response to his tweets has been "shockingly tranquil," he said.

In a space where it's become the norm for people to pick fights, peddle conspiracy theories or blame victims, he has seen little of that.

"Generally speaking," Goldstein said, "people have been overwhelmingly kind and gracious and appreciative of the effort to put a face to the name of these numbers."

The most gratifying reaction is from the families themselves. As many people have had to grieve from afar amid the pandemic, people see value in having their loved one memorialized online.

"It the validates that their loved one even died," he said. "Families appreciate having a space where their loved one can be remembered beyond just a name or a statistic."

Goldstein has been working on putting the names and data — such as age and where they're from, their profession — into a database. He admits the reality of having a full-time job in addition to keeping this up makes it difficult to maintain the database as he would like. Eventually, though, he said he'd like to take all the stories and have them categorized in a searchable public database and turn it into a resource.

"We probably have the largest collection of stories in one place," he said. "As far as I can tell, no one else has done this."

The faces are not all older and white

A few things have stood out to Goldstein throughout the past few months as he works on this project.

"This experience has really underscored the extent to which this virus has taken a disproportionate toll on Black and brown communities across the country," he said.

Looking back at the time The Boston Globe printed 12 pages of obituaries related to COVID-19, Goldstein gets a bit uncomfortable. It was powerful and tragic, he said, but almost every single face on those pages was white.

"That is not a reflection of what's happened," he said, or what he has noticed. "You cannot tell the story of this pandemic if you are going to leave out what I would argue is a legacy of an inequality that softened the ground for a pandemic to have an oversized leveling in Black and brown communities."

When you look at the faces of the people who have died in their teens, 20s and 30s, there are racial disparities, he said.

"My parents are elderly white folks who live in Newton, and I'm terrified for their well-being, and certainly hundreds of older people are dying, and it's an unspeakable tragedy." But, he said, "That is one of the stories of this pandemic, but it's not the only one."

What's next

Goldstein is working to bring his storytelling to the next level. This month, he began releasing a series of digital storytelling videos to highlight the lives of those who are gone.

The first video storytelling effort highlights 40 firefighters who lost their lives to the virus.

"Just allowing people to see the breadth of this," he said, "I think it hits even harder. ... If I can show you the name of a firefighter who died because of it in nearly every state, it helps you understand the magnitude."

The next video will be about teachers who have died because of the virus. He then plans to release at least four more videos. To help pay for those, he's started a fundraiser on GoFundMe. He's raised $3,317 of a goal of $10,000 as of Tuesday.

Here's a look at the first video:

Read more:

Boston Police Officer Dies From Coronavirus

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This article originally appeared on the Waltham Patch