This article is part of our online coverage of reporting on COVID-19. To see more resources, click here.

More than 120,000 people around the world have died of COVID-19 as of the writing of this piece. Journalists aren’t just working overtime to keep up with the pace of new information, regulations and implications of the myriad effects of the pandemic — they are grappling with how to document the losses many communities are grieving. 

Today, goodbyes are said at a distance and memorials are deferred. “There remains only the possibility of greetings through words,” said Giusi Fasano, a reporter at one of Italy’s national newspapers, Corriere della Serra. “Words have become fundamental in this story.” 

Many of the most significant words commemorating the lives of those lost to the virus are found in obituaries, a form of newspaper reporting and writing as old as the profession itself, and more necessary than ever now in the midst of the pandemic. 

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