At Pegasus we have seen the toll of COVID on caregivers and their children first-hand. The waitlist for our Kinship Guardianship legal assistance program went from 0 to over 100 people since the start of the pandemic, with more than half of those cases directly related to COVID-caused circumstances, such as parents dying of COVID or losing their home when they lost their income.
“The cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is mostly noted in the people whose lives it has claimed—more than 740,000 in the U.S. alone, and more than 5 million worldwide. But there are the secondary victims, the collateral casualties—the spouses left widowed, the friends left bereft and, perhaps most poignantly, the children left orphaned. According to a survey recently published in Pediatrics—which relied on census data, as well as on publicly available figures on national fertility rates, deaths directly attributable to COVID-19 and excess deaths over the course of the pandemic compared to a similar period before the pandemic—the number of children in the U.S. who have lost at least one parent to COVID-19 now exceeds 120,000.” – Read the full article aquí.
