The number of children orphaned by COVID-19 has almost doubled in the past six months, bringing to 5.2 million children who have lost a father, a mother or their main provider, or one every six seconds. No less than 2,000 children would be affected in Canada.
At least that’s what a study recently published by the medical journal The Lancet Child and Adolescent Healthbased on data collected in 21 countries accounting for 76% of the deaths recorded since the start of the pandemic.
Based on these data, it is estimated that the number of children who are orphaned or deprived of an adult caregiver would exceed the number of deaths caused by the pandemic worldwide.
This silent tragedy, which has remained in the shadows, portends difficult days for many young people at risk of suffering from psychological and financial insecurity, but also of being exposed to dropping out of school, mental illness, sexual violence, to teenage pregnancy and even institutionalization, insist the authors of this study.
According to the DD Joanne Liu, pediatrician at Sainte-Justine and former international president of the organization Doctors Without Borders, the repercussions of bereavement experienced by children and their effects on their development are frequently overlooked during major epidemics. “It is often said that COVID has little impact on children, but the loss of a parent has a very big impact. It remains one of the blind spots of this pandemic, because all the attention is riveted on the sick or the dead, ”she said.
A number doubled in six months
According to the authors of the study, the number of orphaned children has jumped by 90% since April 2021. To date, the majority of them are between 10 and 17 years old, and 76% have lost a father, and 24 % a mother.
If Canada has been less affected by this phenomenon, with approximately 2,000 children having experienced the death of a parent, it is because parental mortality has affected more countries with fairly high fertility rates and vaccination rates. weaker, say the researchers. In South Africa, the pandemic is said to have killed the parent of one in every 200 children.
They estimate the pandemic has orphaned 1.9 million in India alone and more than 200,000 in Mexico. But it is in Peru and South Africa that the highest rates of orphans per 1000 children have been observed.
Some rich countries have not been spared this outbreak in the pandemic. Notably the United States, where more than 180,000 children have lost a parent to COVID, or about 1 in 500 children. In this country like others, the toll paid by children differs greatly depending on their ethnicity. No less than 65% of “pandemic orphans” belong to racialized groups, which only account for 39% of the population.
One in 310 African-American children has experienced the death of a parent, and one in 412 Hispanic children, twice as many as white children. Young people from indigenous communities were also 4.5 times more bereaved than white children, reveals a study by the National Institutes of Health in the United States.
“A lot of things remain to be measured. We will have to be concerned about the psychological distress that will be felt in the long term, especially in the countries that have experienced the most deaths, ”says the DD Liu. “Even here, at CHU Sainte-Justine,” she says, “we feel the impact of the psychological distress experienced by children who have unfortunately infected one of their grandparents. »