Three religious leaders in the UK have called for a Covid memorial wall created by grieving families to be made permanent.
Imam Kazeem Fatai, rabbi Daniel Epstein and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, formed a united front after seeing the powerful, heart-wrenching artwork in London.
"It's affected a lot of people, it's a global tsunami. So, as believers we need to reflect … it should become permanent," the imam of south London's Old Kent Road mosque said.
The wall is comprised of 150,000 red and pink hearts, each representing a Covid-19 victim and painted by a grieving relative or friend.
It was created beside the Thames, in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament on one side and St Thomas's hospital, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson had his Covid-19 vaccination, on the other.
Last year, the prime minister spent time in an intensive care unit at the same hospital, undergoing treatment for Covid-19.
The memorial stretches for almost 500 metres between the Westminster and Lambeth bridges on the river, and is being added to as the death toll rises.
The archbishop said bereaved relatives must be allowed to decide if the memorial wall, which was installed as a temporary creation to raise awareness, should become permanent.
“It’s organic, not planned, it hasn’t been worked out by a committee, and that makes it all the more powerful,” the archbishop said.
“It’s like a huge wave that’s about to break over you of sorrow – it’s the most extraordinary sight, it’s quite overwhelming.
"It's very moving, very impressive, to think of the depth of love that they've shown been here and working their way down the wall where all these hearts are … it's a great privilege to be here."
Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, the group behind the mural, began the wall as a way to tell the stories of lives lost and to push the government to learn lessons from the pandemic.
Rabbi Daniel Epstein, from the Cockfosters and North Southgate United Synagogue in north London, said the wall gives the personal stories behind the “overwhelming” coronavirus death toll.
“If you come back and focus on a single heart, and you have a name on it with a date and some words, and you take everything that is overwhelming as a statistic and it comes back to a single story … that’s the only way to find out about such an overwhelming experience,” he said.
