Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Thanks for sticking with us here on The Takeaway. Now, we've spent much of this hour addressing issues of childcare. We want to take a look at a very specific and tragic aspect of our national reality. COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more than 700,000 Americans and among those losses are the primary caregivers of more than 175,000 children. This is the shadow pandemic, and these so-called COVID orphans are at risk financially, academically, and emotionally. We talked with JoNel Aleccia, who's senior correspondent at Kaiser Health News.

JoNel Aleccia: Losing a primary caregiver, a parent, or grandparent at any time in a child's life is traumatic. We know that from a huge body of research, that there's higher risks of substance abuse, mental health problems, poor performance in school, lower employment, even earlier risk of death. Losing a parent during a pandemic brings with it all of the risks of the pandemic as well as this loss and as well as the lack of services for these kids that we're seeing because of the pandemic.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about this lack of surfaces. Why would there be fewer services for these young people in particular?

JoNel Aleccia: Many of the services for these kids are nonprofit centers that focus on grief and bereavement. When I talked to them a little bit earlier this year, many of them had suspended, of course, in-person gatherings. The kids are primarily unvaccinated. They had tried to do online groups, Zoom groups, and sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn't, they had less staff. The waiting list got longer, the need grew, and they didn't have the people who could match the need. I don't see any sign that that has improved yet.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Wondering if we have other examples of disaster where we've seen this massive loss for children relative to their caregivers and providers, maybe it wasn't a pandemic. Are there other American experiences of disaster where we've seen so many children lose their adult?

JoNel Aleccia: In the US one discrete example we have is the terror attacks of 9/11, in about 3000 kids that we know of lost parents or caregivers in that attack. The response to them was really different than the response that we've seen so far. There was a federal response, there was massive public fundraising. A lot more galvanized response for that specific event than there has been so far for these kids who have lost parents and caregivers to COVID.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Why do you think that is? Is it because with 9/11, we had a situation where it was so concentrated in one city or really two geographic locations we knew we could identify. In this case, even though there are tens of thousands, they're dispersed across the country.

JoNel Aleccia: Yes, I really do think that's it. This pandemic has been a slow-rolling disaster for these families. One researcher I talked to called the loss of these caregivers for kids of shadow pandemic. It has happened over this period of time, these past two years. It has happened all over the country, in cities, in rural spaces and for one kid, the loss of a parent is a tragedy in that life, but the response of a community is dispersed over time and geography.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are these kids more likely just as the pandemic has hit some racial communities with greater loss, the elderly, obviously much greater loss, but do we see the same patterns of African-American Latino children and particularly Indigenous communities having lost more parents and caregivers?

JoNel Aleccia: Yes. One of the most sobering aspects of this is that 65% of all the children who have experienced COVID orphanhood or death of their primary caregiver have been kids who are racial or ethnic minorities. We know that COVID has disproportionately affected those communities in terms of serious illness and death and it has disproportionately affected these kids as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just as we always try to both shine light on the problems but also begin to think through solutions, you pointed, for example, to global disasters, also to the question of the 9/11 losses, are there things that we can learn about what kinds of support systems need to be in place? What kinds of public policies may be even need to be in place to address this shadow pandemic?

JoNel Aleccia: I think so. I know that the researchers that I've talked to who have worked on child bereavement for a long time certainly want more attention, more funding, more recognition that these are significant events that not only pose risks for these kids, but for the larger society. When you have this cohort, this many children who are going to be harmed in this way, we need to look at the problem and target the effects of bereavement.

The Biden administration so far has spent more than a billion dollars helping to pay for the funeral costs of families who've lost loved ones to COVID, but no specific actions so far about how we're going to deal with the long-term effects of bereavement in these kids.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering about how those of us who are parents and caregivers ought to be talking with our own children and/or planning. I have to say once we got to a point where both my husband and I were fully vaccinated in our parents were fully vaccinated and boosted and all of that, I think we stopped having these conversations. I'm wondering if there's a way that we can take this horror, but also use it as parents and caregivers to do better planning or to face some of what's hard.

JoNel Aleccia: Yes, I think so. I think for parents of young kids all the way up to teenagers, it's a good idea to talk about it. Talk about what would happen, talk about things like, for many of these families that I spoke with, when the primary caregiver died, they lost their health insurance. They lose their income, they lose their health insurance. Many of these kids are eligible for social security benefits if their parent worked within the system and only about half of the kids who are eligible actually receive it.

That could go a long way economically to helping these families. I think it behooves all of us to think what would happen? Do I have a plan? Can I even talk about it with other people in my family about what would happen to my kids? You don't want to dwell in fear but I think it makes sense to at least think about it since we see that it's happening everywhere around us.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, indeed. Thank you so much for joining us to really try to think through both the challenging circumstances for these young people, as well as how all of us have to acknowledge. We continue to live in both a pandemic and now a shadow pandemic. JoNel Aleccia is a senior correspondent at Kaiser Health News. JoNel, thank you so much for your time.

JoNel Aleccia: Thanks for having me.

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