North Carolina brothers create a startling mural mourning the grim milestone of 100,000 US lives lost to the coronavirus with 310 copies of a New York Times cover

• North Carolina brothers Leo and Oliver Egger commemorated the loss of 100,000 Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic with a memorial at the free expression tunnel at Duke University.
• They pasted 310 copies of the front page of The New York Times from last Sunday, which listed approximately 350 names of those who died of COVID-19 on the front page, 1,000 total in the newspaper.
• The mural as a whole roughly equated the US coronavirus death toll.
• The mural is solely made up of the copies of the newspaper and "100,000 LIVES" spray-painted above them. Leo Egger told Insider in an interview that the simplicity of the artwork was intentional.
• "All of America is grieving, and we have to confront that loss for what it is," Leo said.
• According to an Insider poll, one in eight Americans said they knew someone who died of COVID-19.

Last Wednesday, the United States passed a grim milestone with 100,000 lives lost in just over four months amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The New York Times dedicated its Sunday issue to commemorating those lost from the coronavirus, listing around 350 names on the cover. Two brothers in North Carolina took the message a step further to help visualize the impact of the losses in the US.

Leo and Oliver Egger, both 18, memorialized those who died from the coronavirus by pasting 310 copies of the front page of The Times outside the free expression tunnel at Duke University, roughly equating the number of the coronavirus death toll.

"We decided to use that really impactful piece of art, which is the cover of The New York Times, and create this wider piece of art that also confronts you in a similar way, because ... people see it and are really confronted by the loss," Oliver told Insider.

"People walking around Duke will then be confronted by this loss and its true scale and what really 100,000 names look like [because] it covers up this really giant part of his free expression tunnel, which I think is pretty interesting," he continued.

The mural is solely made up of the copies of the newspaper and "100,000 LIVES" spray-painted above them. Leo Egger told Insider that the simplicity of the artwork was intentional.

"Just putting the names up and seeing the scale of it, we knew would be evocative and it would speak for itself," Leo said. "I think the most simple thing we were trying to say is that this is a time of mourning."

"All of America is grieving, and we have to confront that loss for what it is," he added.

Leo said the mission of the mural would to prompt passerby to "just stop for a second and be confronted with it ... in a time where these deaths are trying to be wiped away from our history while it's still happening."

"This is saying, 'No, we are in the middle of this crisis, and these were people who made up our country now and they have been lost," Leo said.

Oliver echoed the sentiment, emphasizing that those who were lost were people in our neighborhoods and communities. According to an Insider poll, one in eight Americans said they knew someone who died of COVID-19.

"These were not people who died 20 years ago. These were not people who died somewhere else. These were people who died in Durham, North Carolina, and people who died in New York City and in the United States of America in these past four months. These were people who made up our community," Oliver said.

Researchers at Columbia University estimated that about 83% of US coronavirus deaths could have been avoided if nationwide lockdowns were imposed March 1, two weeks earlier than when it was enacted. If stay-at-home orders were imposed just one week earlier on March 8, the researchers estimated 36,000 fewer people would have died from the virus by early May.

Over the weekend, the Eggers' mural was spray-painted over with the words, "Police states burn," as protests demanding justice for George Floyd erupted across the country. Floyd was a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes.

The mural became an updated representation of the issues plaguing the US in the present — bringing together a visualization of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as systemic racism and police brutality.

"I think that we believe that the point of this kind of art, as a mural in a public space, is to create dialogue with other artists," Oliver told Insider. "This writing really captures the intense period of pain this country is in and also shows how these two issues are related."

"We understand why this person showed through their art, this relationship between this police brutality against African Americans and the deaths from the pandemic," he continued.