Although there is no official count, it is believed that there are over 300,000 children orphaned in America after losing one or both primary caregivers to COVID-19. Black children have been disproportionately affected. For Andscape, Dwayne Bray profiles the Green family of Detroit, Michigan, whose lives were permanently changed after their mother and father—both frontline workers—died hours apart after contracting COVID, orphaning four adult and three minor children.

Fewer than 1,700 children have died from COVID-19 in the U.S., according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some advocates, researchers and doctors told Andscape that there is a misconception that children have been spared the worst of COVID-19 because relatively few of them have died from the disease. But the deaths of their caregivers have caused hundreds of thousands of children to lose their main source of financial, emotional and developmental support.

These three children are part of a large Detroit family whose mother and father died only hours apart after contracting COVID-19 nearly two years ago. Their maternal grandmother had died of COVID-19 a few months earlier and their 25-year-old first cousin was killed in a car crash weeks later.

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