Children from racial or ethnic minorities were more likely to be affected. A researcher stated that it was “one of the most extreme disparities” he had ever seen.
According to research published in Pediatrics on Thursday, tens of thousands of American children have lost a parent or caregiver to Covid-19. Experts believe this is a terrible consequence of the coronavirus epidemic that will have long-lasting consequences.
This research draws on a variety of data about deaths, births and household compositions to estimate that 129,630 children lost their primary caregiver to Covid-19.
According to new research, 22,007 people lost a second caregiver such as a grandparent or someone who lived in the home.
Susan Hillis, who is a member the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 Response Team, stated that even this may be an underestimate. Only data were available from April 2020 to June 2021, just as supercontagious variants of delta began to emerge.
Hillis stated that a child who loses a parent/caregiver will need support until the age of 18-24. It will be a long-lasting problem.
Richard Besser (president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), was a former acting director at the CDC.
Besser, who wasn’t involved in the research, said that Covid is often discussed by people about how many Covid cases have been reported, how many people have died, and how many people were hospitalized.
He said, “What this study shows is that the effects of Covid go far beyond that.”
Besser, who is a pediatrician, stated that children who lose their primary caregiver run the risk of being evicted or having to change schools.
According to Pew Research, nearly 25% of U.S. children live alone. This is according to the most recent year for which data are available.
According to the Pediatrics study, an estimated 4.5million children lived with grandparent(s) who provided housing in the same year. Grandparents were twice as likely to be grandparents for black, Hispanic, and Asian children than they were for white children.
Other victims of Covid
Covid-19 has helped more than 140,000 children lose a parent or caregiver.
The latest estimate of children who have been abandoned by their parents is significantly higher than the previous estimates.
Rachel Kidman, a Stony Brook Medicine social epidemiologist in New York, reported that Covid was affecting up to 43,000 children in the United States.
Kidman stated that she was shocked to see an increase in the number of children with autism.
She said that there have been more deaths in 2021 than in 2020 since the vaccine was made available. “These deaths are becoming more common in younger people, which means that more parents are being killed.”
