Death of Britain's Captain Sir Tom Moore-- Part 1

From the Feb. 5, 2021, Chicago Tribune "Why the British hero Captain Tom Moore mattered" by Chris Jones.

Beloved centenarian died Wednesday from pneumonia, coronavirus.

"Why did an old man pottering around his perfectly ordinary garden come to mean so much to the British struggle against COVID-19"

"A hundred thousand reasons.  "On January 26, the United Kingdom reported its 100,000th death from the coronavirus.  It was a grim milestone, shared by the United States, which hit that number in May of last year...."

But. Captain Sir Tom Moore dying on February 3 came to represent another number: 60,375.  That was the moment the virus' victims surpass the number of folks killed during World War II on English soil between 1939 and 1945, mostly the consequence of German bombing.

"Moore  was a veteran of that war, and thus he provided a crucial link to a previous era, a mythology really, where many people sacrificed their lives for the common good.  Public health officials. desperate to get people to change their behavior, understood his symbolic power."

--GreGen