China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Flags of remembrance
A sea of white flags is planted by volunteers at the National Mall in Washington DC on Wednesday. The project is part of a public art installation to commemorate people in the United States who have lost their lives to COVID-19. More than 630,000 white flags covering 8 hectares of the National Mall will be on display for two weeks.
She became an orphan once she was born.
As doctors helped Davy Macias, 37, to deliver her baby prematurely by cesarean section, the mother died of complications from COVID-19 while she was intubated. She would never see her daughter.
Her husband, Daniel Macias, 39, would get only a brief glimpse of the baby girl because he also was being treated in the same hospital after contracting the virus. Less than two weeks later, he also died from complications from the virus, leaving the child without parents or a name.
The California couple left behind five children, ages 7, 5, 3, 2, and now 3 weeks.
The children are being cared for by their grandparents.
Terry Macias, Daniel’s mother, told CNN that she isn’t sure if the children understand that their parents are not coming home.
Terry Macias also told The Washington Post that the children “spend a lot of time at night looking for Mom and Dad”.
The two are among more than 660,000 people in the US who have died due to the coronavirus. Davy Macias was unvaccinated because she was pregnant. Her husband also was not vaccinated, according to USA Today.
Their deaths echo the story of Lydia and Lawrence Rodriguez, a Texas couple who last month died weeks apart, leaving behind four children, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Nearly 114,000 children have lost their parents, grandparents or caregivers to COVID-19 in the US, according to a paper published in The Lancet in July. The US ranks fourth with the most children orphaned by COVID-19 deaths, behind Mexico, Brazil and India.
“Our study establishes minimum estimates — lower bounds — for the numbers of children who lost parents and/or grandparents,” Juliette Unwin, the study’s co-lead author, said in a statement. “Many demographic, epidemiological, and healthcare factors suggest that the true numbers affected could be orders of magnitude larger.”
Low vaccination rates, she said, will result “in millions of more children experiencing orphanhood”.
That toll is expected to worsen as the pandemic, now driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, increasingly infects unvaccinated people under age 50 who are most likely to have dependent children.
“Out of control COVID-19 epidemics abruptly and permanently alter the lives of the children who are left behind,” Seth Flaxman, one of The Lancet study’s authors, said in a statement. These children, he said, “will grow up profoundly damaged by the experience”.
There are also racial disparities involved. In April, researchers reported in JAMA Pediatrics that while black children constitute about 14 percent of this nation’s population under 18, they make up 20 percent of all children who’ve lost a parent to COVID-19.
“Children losing primary caregivers have higher risks of experiencing mental health problems; physical, emotional, and sexual violence; and family poverty,” said the research team at The Lancet.
“These adverse experiences raise risks of suicide, adolescent pregnancy, infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, and chronic diseases.”
“There is an urgent need to prioritize these children and support them for many years into the future,” said Susan Hillis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led the study.
Support for a grieving child can take several forms, including individual counseling and camps or group programs. The National Alliance for Grieving Children provides resources and a regional directory for helping children deal with loss.
“Public health responses to the pandemic, such as stay-at-home orders and the constraints of conducting child protection evaluations remotely, have severely reduced the capacity of established child protection systems and services to provide much needed child safety interventions and support,” the study said.
The timing of providing the aid is crucial, according to psychologist Kathryn Cullen, who wrote in a 2018 editorial in The American Journal of Psychiatry that “the first two years after losing a parent is a period of critical risk for developing depression”, according to Forbes.
The CDC urged all pregnant women to get the COVID vaccine in early August, as hospitals in US hot spots saw a rise in the number of unvaccinated mothers-to-be seriously ill with the virus.
Studies have found that the coronavirus vaccine does not heighten the risk of miscarriages, according to the Journal. Research shows that those who are pregnant face a higher risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms, premature births and “other adverse pregnancy outcomes” if they contract the virus, the CDC said.