By Rachel Kidman, Nature, August 9, 2021
I have spent my career studying how the HIV epidemic affects children. One profound way is through the death of one or both parents — the United Nations definition of an orphan. As of 2020, about 15 million children and adolescents, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, had lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS. These youngsters face immense challenges. Through decades of research, the field is slowly learning how to help them lead healthy lives and succeed in school.
I never thought that my expertise on pandemics and mass child bereavement would be relevant to the United States. And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As I saw the daily death counts grow, I worried about the children being left behind. There were some anecdotal stories published, but no rigorous estimates that captured the true scale of this crisis for children. So, my colleagues and I set out to answer the question: how many young people are losing parents to the pandemic?
It was an ever-increasing target. With every draft of our paper, we had to revise the count. We ran the last model just before publication; our estimate was that, between February 2020 and February 2021, about 40,000 children had been orphaned as a result of the pandemic, just in the United States1. To put this another way: for every 13 or so US COVID-19 deaths, a child loses a parent.
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