AP journalists around the country teamed up to deliver fast and deeply reported coverage in all formats to mark the U.S. surpassing a half-million deaths.
The U.S. surpassed a solemn milestone on Feb. 22 with 500,000 COVID-19 deaths, a moment in the pandemic that required thoughtful planning and storytelling, and precise execution across the AP for the coverage to stand out.
Editors began planning weeks in advance. They wanted impactful photo and video packages, lightning-fast spot coverage of the milestone being reached, and a text story to anchor the report that was different from AP’s previous recognition of 100,000, 250,000 and 400,000 deaths.
The result was a package that resonated in all formats.
Video journalists Eugene Garcia and Manuel Valdes, working with producer Krysta Fauria, delivered a video piece that drew on harrowing moments from the past year — doctors saving patients’ lives in hospitals, temporary morgues, cemeteries among others. The newsroom-ready piece received a remarkable 200 newsroom downloads (on par with the play for the Tiger Woods crash in the same week).
Top Stories photo editor Alyssa Goodman and San Francisco writer Jocelyn Gecker worked together on a photo gallery and story taking people from the first COVID deaths to the 500,000th, with careful photo selection and poignant writing. The piece evoked strong feelings on the massive toll of the virus, the death and grieving, and the new hope represented by vaccines.
Cindy Pollock adjusts the construction flags in her front yard in Boise, Idaho, Feb. 10, 2021. When Pollock began planting the tiny flags across her yard — one for each of the more than 1,800 Idahoans killed by COVID-19 — the toll was mostly a number. Until two women she had never met rang her doorbell in tears, seeking a place to mourn the husband and father they had just lost.
AP Photo / Otto Kitsinger
An image of veteran James Sullivan is projected onto the home of his son, Tom Sullivan, who looks out a window at left with brother Joseph Sullivan in South Hadley, Mass., May 4, 2020. Sullivan, a U.S. Army WWII veteran and resident of the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, Mass., died from COVID-19 four days shy of his 100th birthday. Seeking to capture moments of private mourning at a time of global isolation, AP photographer David Goldman used a projector to cast large images of veterans onto homes as their loved ones struggle to honor their memory during a lockdown that has sidelined many funeral traditions.
AP Photo / David Goldman
Pat Marmo, owner of Daniel J. Schaefer Funeral Home, walks through his body-holding facility where is struggling to handle an overflow of bodies stemming from COVID-19 deaths in the Brooklyn borough of New York, April 2, 2020. “This is a state of emergency,” he said at the time. “We need help.”
AP Photo / John Minchillo
Siblings Erika and Dwayne Bermudez comfort one another during a short viewing of their mother, Eudiana Smith, who died of coronavirus, at The Family Funeral Home in Newark, N.J., May 2, 2020. “I was robbed of the experience of being able to celebrate her life in a manner that would offer some kind of respect for the woman she was,” Erika Bermudez said. She did her best, live-streaming the ceremony to friends and family who couldn’t attend.
AP Photo / Seth Wenig
Vivian Zayas holds onto the walker once belonging to her recently deceased mother, Ana Martinez, while her family prays before Thanksgiving dinner in Deer Park, N.Y., Nov. 26, 2020. Ana Martinez, 78, died of COVID-19 on April 1 while recovering at a nursing home from a knee replacement.
AP Photo / John Minchillo
CPR is performed on a patient inside the coronavirus unit at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, July 6, 2020. Despite their efforts, the patient died.
AP Photo / David J. Phillip
A blanket is pulled over the body of a patient after medical personnel tried without success to save her life inside the coronavirus unit at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, July 6, 2020.
AP Photo / David J. Phillip
Romelia Navarro, right, is comforted by nurse Michele Younkin as she weeps at the bedside of her dying husband, Antonio, in St. Jude Medical Center's COVID-19 unit in Fullerton, Calif., July 31, 2020. Antonio was the first COVID-19 patient to pass wile under Younkin’s care.
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Chaplain Kristin Michealsen holds the hand of a deceased COVID-19 patient while talking on the phone with a member of the patient’s family, at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills section of Los Angeles, Jan. 9, 2021. “I have never seen this much death and suffering,” said Michealsen, who has been a chaplain for 13 years. “I often tell families that I’m holding their loved one’s hand when they can’t and that I am with them when they are dying, when they can’t be.”
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Eugene Davis kneels into a grave at Cedar Hill Cemetery to check the depth before a funeral for Judge Brooks Jr. in Dawson, Ga., April 18, 2020. Area residents describe themselves as a cautionary tale of what happens when the virus seeps into American’s most vulnerable communities, quietly at first, then with breathtaking savagery.
AP Photo / Brynn Anderson
Mortician Cordarial O. Holloway, foreground left, funeral director Robert L. Albritten, foreground right, and funeral attendants Eddie Keith, background left, and Ronald Costello place a casket into a hearse on in Dawson, Ga., April 18, 2020. An AP analysis of available data showed that nearly one-third of those who had died in the area were Black people, despite making up only about 14% of the population.
AP Photo / Brynn Anderson
National writer Adam Geller wrote the text piece that included compelling voices of families who lost loved ones, leading with a woman in Idaho who placed flags in her yard to commemorate the dead and had strangers showing up at her house in pursuit of a place to remember those lost.
Top stories editor Pete Brown worked with Geller on a Flash and urgent story filled with historical context that allowed the AP to quickly mark the historic moment. The data team wrote a program to provide automatic updates to a Slack channel every 3 minutes, pulling statistics from the Johns Hopkins site so that we could file as quickly as possible after the number was reached.
The story and photos landed on front pages of the Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Detroit News and Orlando Sentinel, among dozens of others. The video piece was among our most downloaded package of the week. And all the work drew significant traffic to AP News with high reader engagement on the day the U.S. reached a half-million dead.
For meeting the grim milestone with comprehensive and coordinated all-formats coverage, the team of Geller, Gecker, Goodman, Brown, Garcia, Valdes and Fauria wins this week’s Best of the States award.
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