Sri Lanka COVID-19 Memorial Site
This is a project posting
Visit project →This is not a new project, This is a recounting of events that took place five years ago.
It’s late July, amidst the pandemic. We were all home, surviving. I was fortunate that no one close to me succumb to COVID-19, I do remember being shocked one day on Twitter (which I was religiously hooked on back then)
A Tweep we were following, she was sick from COVID-19 and was tweeting how it sucks and she’s quarantining. A day later a friend of her Tweeted how she had passed away…
The project came after, this was not something I spearheaded, a lot of folks were behind it. Full list of contributors and story of the concept can be found on the about page.
I took on the tasks of setting up the website and building data pipelines to process the scanned reports by the government. Group of volunteers checked and help manage the data set. Soon after we started accepting submissions from the public.
Technical details: All software built was Open Source. Find them in the GitHub Organisation.
Some other websites who reported on this,
- “A Digital Space For Grief: The Sri Lanka COVID-19 Memorial” by Roar Media, reported on 05-10-2021
- “Memorial created to commemorate COVID deaths in Sri Lanka” by Hiru News (Gold FM News), reported on 04-10-2021
- “The Sri Lanka COVID-19 Memorial” by Daily Express, reported on 06-10-2021
- “Group of volunteers launch Sri Lanka COVID-19 memorial website” by TechNews.LK, reported on 05-10-2021
- “කොවිඩ් මරණ සිහි කරන්න අන්තර්ජාල අඩවියක්” by NewsWire Sinhala, reported on 04-10-2021
2026-08-27 Update:
It was becoming hard to maintain this website with it’s old dependencies. And I had forgotten to renew the domain. Aided with LLM coding tools, I managed to migrate the site to a Hugo static site and host it on GitHub pages. As for the interactive forms I added Google Forms to collect input.