According to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics of the American Medical Association, it is estimated that 37,300 to 43,000 children in the United States have suffered the loss of at least one parent due to COVID-19 in the last year.
A closer look at the data found that the burden, which the study’s authors acknowledge, is likely to “get heavier” amid the ongoing pandemic, has landed disproportionately on black children.
Black children represent only 14% of those under the age of 18 in the United States, but the study estimated that they represent 20% of children who have lost a parent due to coronavirus.
The authors said they were able to track parental grief as the pandemic progressed, estimating the expected number of children affected for each COVID-19 death.
“We used kinship networks of black and white people in the United States estimated by demographic microsimulation to calculate the mourning multiplier, then we used the multiplier to estimate the extent of parental suffering in different mortality scenarios,” they wrote.
The authors stated that the estimates were based on demographic modeling and did not include “the grief of non-parental primary caregivers”. They added that the study is also based on “unidentified, publicly available data” and is not “considered the research of human subjects”.
Their research model, they wrote, “suggests that every death in COVID-19 leaves 0.078 children between the ages of 0 and 17 parents alive,” which they noted represents an increase from 17.5 to 20, 2 percent “increase in parental suffering in the absence of COVID-19”.
The authors called the “estimated” number of children who lost a parent to the coronavirus “startling,” saying that “radical national reforms are needed to address the health, educational and economic consequences affecting children.”
“The sudden death of parents, such as that caused by COVID-19, can be particularly traumatic for children and can leave sick families ready to navigate its consequences,” they wrote.
“Moreover, the loss of COVID-19 occurs at a time of social isolation, institutional tension and economic hardship, potentially leaving children suffering without the support they need,” they added.
The United States has reported nearly 31 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and more than 555,000 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.