Wednesday March 12, 2025

Greetings, MindSite News readers. The five-year pandemic anniversary is here.

Five years ago this week, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. The virus went on to kill 1.2 million Americans, the most of any country in the world. Many of those who died were parents, and the story of the children they left behind has gotten far too little attention.

In Part 3 of our Forgotten Children series, we look deeper and focus in on Native American children, who lost parents at the highest rate of any group. Coming tomorrow: In a story called Opioid Orphans: Grandparents Struggle to Raise Children Left Behind, we look at the grandparents who stepped in to raise children who’d lost parents to opioid overdoses.

MINDSITE NEWS ORIGINALS

COVID Stole a Parent from Over 200,000 Children. Indian Country Lost the Most

COVID-19 hit the Navajo Nation in waves, like an invisible tsunami that swept people away from their loved ones. Hospitals across the country overflowed with patients, but the virus had a particular ferocity when it hit remote Navajo communities in northern Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. In its wake, families were shattered: 2,000 Indigenous children in that region lost a parent or caregiver, according to one analysis. Yet that number doesn’t convey the grief that continues to reverberate at the five-year COVID anniversary.

COVID was not an equal-opportunity destroyer. American Indian and Alaska Native children were orphaned at three times the rate of white children, and Black children at double the rate. Without support, children who lose a parent or caregiver are at risk of developing lasting problems with depression, lower academic achievement, and behavioral issues.

Read the full story here.

Forgotten Children

Parental death has been rising in the U.S. due to COVID-19, the overdose epidemic and gun violence. Forgotten Children is a four-part series on the tragic and underreported problem of childhood grief – and the efforts to address it. Stories by Michele Cohen Marill.

Support for the reporting in the Forgotten Children series was provided by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 National Fellowship and its Kristy Hammam Fund for Health Journalism and by the Commonwealth Fund.

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