Colombia is the fifth country in the world with the most orphans due to the pandemic

Recently the magazine The Lancet has published a modeling study in which it makes global minimum estimates of children orphaned as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, either due to the death of their parents or primary caregivers. This disease has claimed the lives of more than 4 million people worldwide and it is estimated that at least 1.5 million children have lost a parent or guardian.

In Colombia, according to this study, one of the most difficult scenarios for children was observed, since our country occupied the fifth among the countries in which the largest number of children have been orphaned as a result of the pandemic. They clarified that, in this case, they used the concept of orphanage established by UNICEF, in which a child is orphaned after the death of one or both parents, as well as the caregivers who have custody of them. .

In the case of Colombia, for every 1,000 children, 2.3 have lost their guardians, noted in the report. Compared to the highest difras in the world, Colombia ranks fifth and is part of the group of ten countries where the orphan rate is greater than 1.

Information obtained and published by the British medical journal identified a group of countries as having the most orphaned children during the pandemic and it is striking that the presence of Latin American countries predominates. First, Peru, with 10.2 orphans per 1,000 children; followed by South Africa (5.1), Mexico (3.5), Brazil (2.4), Colombia (2.3), Iran (1.7), United States (1.5), Argentina (1.1), Russia (1.0) and Poland (1.0).

However, considering that this study only considered data up to April 2021, the numbers in each country could increase a bit. It has been estimated that in the case of Colombia, after 13 months of the pandemic, the number of children orphaned by the pandemic could have reached 29,000.

The researchers used data and statistics on deaths of people from the pandemic around the world between March 2020 and April 2021 obtained by Johns Hopkins University and were able to establish that on that date, the number of orphans in the world was 1.5 million, figure which could exceed 2 million to date.

Regarding the serious figures they established, researcher Susan Hill pointed out that “our estimates of the number of children affected, which have just been published, indicate that for every two people who die from covid-19, a child is orphaned after having faced the death of the father or the mother, or the grandfather or the grandmother who took care of him and who lived at home ”.

This study was carried out with information on covid-19 from Johns Hopkins University and was prepared by academics from Harvard University, Imperial College London, University of Oxford, University College London and the University of Cape Town, and institutions such as the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO).

On the other hand, these figures were also recently updated by Imperial College London, where it was pointed out that If we take into account the strongest days of the third wave of the virus in the country, at the beginning of August the number of orphaned minors would actually be 49,300, which would have meant that more than 20,000 children have been orphaned in the past three months.

On the other hand, if we add up the cases of children who lost their grandparents, who had custody or who were mainly caring for the children, the same number rises to 55,000.

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