The number '5,000' is projected onto the Georgia State Capitol Building during an Aug. 27 vigil honoring the more than 5,000 Georgians who have lost their lives to COVID-19.

ATLANTA — There weren’t enough paper hearts Thursday to memorialize every Georgian who lost their life to COVID-19.

Organizers of the “Loved Ones, Not Numbers” memorial and candle vigil prepared 5,000 individual cards with broken hearts to string along the fence outside the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. But by the time the event came, 393 more people had succumbed to the coronavirus.

Jana Johnson-Davis, a member of the Georgia Coalition 2 Save Lives and chair of the campaign for families, said the goal of the memorial was to “put names and faces” to Georgia’s victims of COVID-19.

“When the pandemic first hit and we first started learning about people who were dying, there was always a little bit of biographical information about them on the news,” she said. “Then as the numbers start increasing, they just became numbers.”

In downtown Atlanta, family and friends came together to mourn their losses and were invited to claim a broken heart for their lost loved one. Many wrote their final goodbyes.

Yolanda Melson lost her 69-year-old mother, Carolyn Russell, on April 12. The last time she was able to see her was the day before she died after a kind nurse let her sneak briefly into the her room. Melson said her mother would give even a stranger whatever she had and never complain about it.

“I miss her laugh,” she said. “But I am here to speak for her, to live out her dreams for her, live out her life for her. I’m just an advocate for my mom.”

East Point Democrat State Rep. William Boddie, House minority whip, was among those stringing up thousands of broken hearts — an act that he said gives “true humanity” to the pandemic in Georgia.

“We have to recognize them and not look at them as just numbers,” he said. “But as lives — as mothers, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, colleagues, church members — so we always remember them.”

But while celebrating the lives of those lost, the group lamented that more could have been done to possibly prevent so many deaths from happening. Advocates and grieving family called on Gov. Brian Kemp to rollback his aggressive reopening plan.

“We’re hoping that this visual will employ our governor to do some things differently. We know that most of these deaths could have been prevented if we had not reopened so quickly,” Johnson-Davis said.

The latest report from the White House Coronavirus Task Force dated Aug. 23, obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, shows Georgia has the second highest COVID-19 case rate in the country — after being ranked number one the previous week. The state is still in the “red zone” for rate of new cases and members recommend a statewide mask mandate for counties with 20 or more active cases.

The report says Georgia is making progress in the battle against COVID-19 but “improvement remains fragile.”

Kemp has long bucked the idea of a statewide mandate and just recently signed an executive order allowing cities and counties to institute their own — with limitations. The Republican governor is adamant that Georgians “don’t need a mandate to do the right thing.”

But families at the memorial said the governor is putting businesses ahead of lives.

Lakia Brandenburg said her mother, Ruth Arrington, had her dreams taken away from her when she lost her life to COVID-19. The 67-year-old passed May 1 after battling the virus for 30 days. Before she became ill, she had aspirations to start her own catering company.

“My mother was a gift to us,” Brandenburg said. “My mother was robbed of her dreams. She was robbed of the memories we could have made with her.”