There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

Worldwide, we've lost over a million people from COVID.

And here in the United States, we've lost over 200,000 people to COVID.

According to the APM research lab, one in every 120 black Americans is now dead from COVID.

Let that sink in.

It's an absolutely staggering figure.

Yet, we've had no national large-scale mourning of these deaths.

Earlier this fall, Trump even said that COVID impacted, quote, virtually nobody.

Mickey McKella, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and author of

The Politics of Mourning, told CNN that instead of mourning, Americans have been fed a kind of wartime

attitude about how he must defeat the virus and must not let the virus win.

And that that response has largely been about not marking death, not marking tragedy, and not

marking the horror of the ongoing lack of meaningful response, but instead focusing on that this

is what Americans do.

But that's not what we should do.

Collective mourning is important, and mourning is an important step of dealing with grief.

We can't just pretend these people never existed. They did.

And there are more than just data points on some chart about COVID.

There are mothers and daughters and friends and family and colleagues.

This week, faith leaders from all over the country held visuals in person and online

to mourn those we've lost to

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