Pinay in L.A. creates online memorial to honor fallen Filipino health care workers

A Filipina based in Los Angeles, California created a data wall and digital memorial to track and honor the Filipino health care workers who have succumbed to COVID-19.

Jollene Levid created the website "Kanlungan" with a group of people after losing friends and relatives to the disease.

On the website are profiles of the healthcare workers they were able to record, along with a tribute for each of them.

There is also a map that plots down the locations of the fallen heroes.

^{Screencap from "Kanlungan" website}

In an interview with NPR, she said she first lost her aunt, Rosary Castro-Olega, who was a registered nurse.

"She passed away without being named, you know, for weeks. Two weeks later, I lost another aunt. They worked with my mother for 30 years in the ICU as registered nurses," she said.

"And as the days went on, we noticed that a lot of the health care workers - unless there were independent journalists covering their family's stories, we were unable to identify them. And so there were a group of us. We got together. And we started basically documenting everything we could find," she added.

Levid said that many frontliners around the world had roots tracing back to the Philippines.

Just in California, one in five registered nurses is of Philippine ancestry, while in New York, 34.3 percent of Filipinos are in the health care industry.

"So we're highly overrepresented in the health care industry because of historic exclusion except for health care professionals, for example, and educators that were allowed to migrate here," she said.

Based on the data she and her team has collected, Levid revealed that the United States has "more than double the deaths of Philippine health care workers than the Philippines itself."

The country with the second-highest number of deaths of Filipino health care professionals is the United Kingdom.

Levid recognizes that there are gaps in the efforts of governments in tracking these numbers, so they have taken it upon themselves to do the work.

"Every single day, we're still combing the news. We're still checking to see if more testimony have been submitted by loved ones," she said.

Levid is the Founding Chairperson of AF3IRM, an anti-imperialist, transnational feminist women’s organization, originally a Philippine mass-solidarity organization. AF3IRM is the team behind "Kanlungan." 

Last July, doctors in the Philippines said that the situation in the front lines is worse than before.

According to a report on "24 Oras," several hospitals have reported COVID-19 infections among their staff.

“We are seeing more severe cases. The reality is lahat ng tao sa front lines pagod na,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Monica Reyes-Montecillo said.

COVID-19 cases in the Philippines rose to 122,754 on Friday, with 66,852 recoveries, and 2,168 deaths.

Globally, at least 19,133,340 cases have been registered in 196 countries and territories. Of these, at least 11,319,300 are now considered recovered. The death toll is at 715,343.

—JCB, GMA News