More than four million people have died as a result of the coronavirus. For many children, this means the loss of a parent. Now there is an extrapolation.
New York – Around 1.1 million children worldwide have lost at least one parent or grandparent who cared for them as a result of the corona pandemic, according to a study.
This extrapolation applies to the period from March 2020 to April 2021, report researchers working with Seth Flaxman from Imperial College in London in the journal “The Lancet”. If you add other older relatives living in the household, more than 1.5 million children would have lost a caregiver.
This is a significant, so far overlooked consequence of the pandemic, writes the US health authority NIH in a communication on the study. The analysis makes it clear that psychosocial and economic support for these children should play a central role in the response to this pandemic.
As a basis for the study, the researchers used, among other things, data on the birth rate and corona death rates from around two dozen countries, which they extrapolated. Because the data are not collected to the same extent everywhere, the figures can only be approximations – probably rather underestimated – according to the scientists.
The number of children who have been orphaned orphaned by the pandemic is particularly high in relation to the population in South Africa, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, among others. The number of children who have lost fathers is two to five times as high as the number of children who have lost mothers. dpa
