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Shirley L Smith reports for The Guardian:
As the United States engages in a bitter battle to prevent people from contracting and dying from Covid-19, another pandemic rages behind closed doors among children who have lost one or both parents, or their caregivers, because of Covid.
A new study, published Thursday in the journal Pediatrics, estimated that between April 2020 and June 30 of this year, more than 140,000 children under the age of 18 lost their mothers, fathers or grandparents who were insured. their housing, their basic needs and their daily care. to disease.
Study reveals that Covid not only disproportionately kills adults in communities of color, but children in those communities bear the brunt of the aftershocks of this “hidden pandemic,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on drug abuse (Nida), which co-funded the study.
Although people from racial and ethnic minorities make up 39% of the U.S. population, the study shows that approximately 65% of children who have lost a primary caregiver are Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Native American / Native American minorities. ‘Alaska. Thirty-five percent are white.
“The death of a parental figure is a huge loss that can reshape the life of a child,” Volkow said. But researchers say the needs of these children have been largely overlooked.
“Compared to white children, Native American / Alaska Native children were 4.5 times more likely to lose a parent or grandparent, black children were 2.4 times more likely, and Hispanic children were 1, 8 times more likely, ”Nida said.
The study was a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Imperial College London, Harvard University, the University of Oxford and the University of Cape Town. The researchers used mortality, fertility and census data to estimate the orphanage associated with Covid, which they define as the death of one or both parents, or the death of a custodial grandparent or co -resident who was primarily responsible for looking after a child or lived in the same household as the parent and helped care for the child.
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