More than 1,000 candles form cross to remember COVID-19 victims in Brazil

Drone captures 1000 candles forming cross for COVID-19 victims

A candlelight vigil was held in Mutuipe, Brazil, for coronavirus casualties on March 6.

MUTUIPE, Brazil - More than 1,000 candles were lit to form the shape of a cross to remember the lives lost to COVID-19 in Mutuipe, Brazil.

Drone video captured the stunning and sobering sight on March 6.

Cristiano Cardoso Pereira flew a drone over the candlelight cross comprised of 1,910 candles to represent the record-breaking number of COVID-19 deaths recorded in Brazil on March 3 alone.

"The idea was to sensitize the population to hygiene care, social distance and preventive measures, emphasizing the pain and grief, with the utmost respect, to families that had their loved ones lost in this serious health crisis," Pereira said of the candlelight vigil.

Freeze frame from drone footage that captured a giant cross formed out of more than 1,000 during a vigil held for COVID-19 victims in Brazil.

Brazil has the second-highest number of COVID-19 deaths with over 270,000 as of March 11, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

The novel coronavirus is responsible for killing over 2.6 million people globally and the United States remains at the top in terms of impact with the most deaths — 529,849 as of March 11, Johns Hopkins data said.

Brazil has also been a hotbed for new COVID-19 variants, particularly a variant known as P.1, which has shown evidence of avoiding total neutralization by both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

The new variant is also believed to be able to cause reinfection in people who have already recovered from COVID-19. It is also believed to be more transmissible.

But experts say that vaccines are not completely useless against the Brazil variant."There’s no concluding evidence really to suggest at this point that the current vaccines won’t work against P.1," said Nuno Faria, a virus expert at Imperial College London, during a media briefing. "I think (the vaccines) will at least protect us against disease, and possibly also against infection."

March 11 marks the one-year anniversary since the COVID-19 virus outbreak was deemed a global pandemic, and life has changed significantly for most of the world.

Weddings were canceled, schools were shut down and millions of people lost their jobs.

Records were broken for number of deaths in a day as well as the amount of time it took to create a vaccine capable of protecting people from severe COVID-19 infections.

One of the largest vaccination efforts was kicked off early this year with the approval of now three vaccines in the U.S. as well as several others globally with hopes to usher in life as it was before the pandemic.

The Associated Press, Storyful and Kelly Taylor Hayes contributed to this report.

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