Covid vaccine: Mums in the US still are not alright

After a morning hour at the playground, Lauriana Zuluaga and her seven-year-old son spend the day inside, where she juggles being a full-time caretaker with her job as an advertising executive.

Her husband, a musician, recently returned to work in a studio they own. More than once, Ms Zuluaga says, she has considered quitting, but her family, who live in Manhattan, couldn’t afford the loss of income.

“We do what we can to live,” she says, “but it’s tough.”

Her voice conveys her guilt and exhaustion as she describes living through the last 16 months of the pandemic without child care. Though more than half of New York City is vaccinated, children under 12 like her son are still ineligible for the vaccine. The rise of more transmissible Covid-19 variants has Zuluaga, 45, on edge.

“We haven’t really (acknowledged) the fact that it’s summer,” she says. “We’re just in this state right now … of (being) freaked out, so we don’t know what to do.”

Ms Zuluaga says she would make financial sacrifices to re-hire her son’s trusted full-time babysitter but the sitter isn’t vaccinated. Summer camps in New York that specialise in working with children with special needs (her son is autistic and has ADHD) have been out of reach due to lack of slots or high cost. One camp with availability cost Ksh5.5m for the summer, more than the average college tuition in the US.

Children's needs

For many mothers across the US, the semblance of normalcy many Americans have embraced this summer has remained frustratingly out of reach.

Like Ms Zuluaga, they are struggling with the new phase of the pandemic; continuing to balance children’s needs and safety with work demands or job loss and financial limitations, compounded by new concerns over spotty vaccination rates and increasingly contagious virus variants.

On top of concerns about the virus itself, the pandemic has led to a substantial increase in the cost of childcare and decreased the availability of childcare slots, furthering the childcare crisis for mothers of young children.

Now, as the Covid-19 delta variant becomes increasingly prevalent in the US, experts worry that working mothers of unvaccinated babies could face a deepened childcare crisis, furthering the short and long-term economic gaps between men and women, especially for black and Latina women.

“Women bore the brunt of this pandemic in so many ways, especially women of colour,” says Melissa Boteach, vice-president of income security and child care and early learning at the National Women’s Law Centre (NWLC).

“Until childcare doesn’t just come back, but returns in a way that is stable and equitable, we’re not going to see the same kinds of recovery for women as we will for men.”

Delta variant

Nearly 2.3 million women have left the labour force since the beginning of the pandemic, compared to almost 1.8 million men, according to a report by the NWLC. The same report found that women were three times more likely than men not to be working during the pandemic because of childcare issues.

For mothers with children too young to be vaccinated yet, many of the same restraints on childcare are still very real, says Boteach. “What you’re seeing now is people … who are dealing with either finding care or affording care are being told well, everything is fine now,” she says. “Just because you say everything is fine, doesn’t mean everything is fine.”

Although there is good evidence suggesting that children are less likely to catch and transmit the Covid-19 virus, the more transmissible delta variant poses a genuine risk to children, says Keri N. Althoff, an epidemiology professor at Johns Hopkins University. She says parents of unvaccinated children should pay close attention to community spread and vaccination rates as they make decisions about childcare, camps, the upcoming school year, and family safety.

“This is not an all-or-nothing game,” says Althoff. “It’s the little steps and layers of mitigation … that truly does help reduce the likelihood of transmission and infection.”

For Jessica Blanchard, a health researcher in Oklahoma, the increased rate of Covid-19 infections in Oklahoma on top of the threat posed by the delta variant has led her to the decision to keep her daughters, aged five and nine years, at home with her this summer. “We’re still struggling … especially as we’re in this phase of limbo,” says Ms Blanchard. “We had hoped that we could begin getting back to some kind of normal, and now, I just see that plummeting.”

Although she appreciates having flexible hours that allow her to balance childcare and work, “it’s kind of exhausting,” says Ms Blanchard, 42. With the delta variant in play alongside low State-wide vaccination rates in Oklahoma and lifting of mask mandates in schools, Ms Blanchard worries about a potential return to online learning. “The prospect of having to do it all over again right now is enough to just make me spin,” she says.

Mitigation strategies

Rising childcare costs and diminished availability have continued to be significant double barriers for mothers, says Boteach. The Centre for American Progress says the cost of providing childcare increased roughly 47 per cent during the pandemic, and predict this rise in costs will be passed on to working families.

Approximately 72 per cent of families say childcare has become more expensive due to the pandemic, according to a survey for Care.com, and 46 per cent say childcare is harder to find.

Nearly two-thirds of mothers have reported being very or somewhat worried about balancing work responsibilities with personal and family needs during the pandemic, according to a May Institute for Women’s Policy Research survey.

Sophia Bessias, 33, a data scientist in North Carolina, says finding care she feels comfortable with for her 11-month old son and three-year-old daughter has been incredibly costly.

Ms Bessias and her husband hired a nanny after their daughter’s childcare centre closed early in the pandemic. Ms Bessias says she and their sitter agreed on risk mitigation strategies, including the nanny receiving the vaccine once it became available.

Unvaccinated child

Currently, Ms Bessias pays her nanny Ksh328,000 a month to care for both children during the day, which she says is the family’s largest expense by far. “It’s such a huge expense for us to pay this for childcare,” she says. But a classroom environment for her toddler, she says, “doesn’t feel like an option” anytime soon.

Employers offering workplace flexibility, including work-from-home options to mothers to care for an unvaccinated child who becomes exposed to, or infected with the virus and may need to quarantine, will help ensure mothers are not financially penalised during the recovery, says Emily Gee, senior economist at the Centre for American Progress.

“I think that could have serious effects not just for job recovery, but also the trajectory of lifetime earnings for women,” says Ms Gee.

In New York, Ms Zuluaga says she’ll continue pushing through her fatigue to keep working. “Everyone is struggling in their own way … and everybody is figuring out how to cope,” she says. “I’m very thankful for being one of the people who have figured out how to cope.”

This story originally appeared in The Fuller Project’s newsletter