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 | | The New York Times |
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 | | London's National Covid Memorial Wall became a place for victims' families to mourn.Andrew Testa for The New York Times |
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The pandemic, now in its third year, has reached a monumental scale across the world. Countries have now logged 500 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, including more than 200 million this year. |
The number of new cases reported around the globe each day has been declining. Johns Hopkins University researchers have reported a 34 percent drop since two weeks ago, and there are about 3,700 deaths a day, down about 24 percent. |
But the true numbers are almost certainly much higher among the global population of 7.9 billion because of a lack of testing around the world. |
Many infections have gone undetected or unreported. A W.H.O. analysis estimated that 65 percent of Africans had been infected as of September 2021, for example, which is nearly 100 times the number of confirmed cases on the continent. |
The rising popularity of at-home antigen tests has also snarled numbers, since many of those positive results are never reported to public health authorities. And many people with infections are never tested at all. |
Limited testing is "dangerous," Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, told The Times. "If you don't test, then you don't know what variants you have." |
 | | William Lanzisera, above, has helped take care of his grandchildren after their father died of Covid.Todd Heisler/The New York Times |
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Grandparents are often the first line of defense in the wake of family tragedy — and never more so than during the pandemic. |
An estimated 200,000 children in the U.S. lost at least one parent to Covid-19. Our colleague Paula Span, a Times health columnist, spoke with some of the many families where grandparents helped fill the gaps. |
She found older people who had put retirement plans on hold and dusted off their hands-on parenting skills, returning to playground or homework-help duty. For many, caring for their child's child helped to ease the grief. |
Jocelyn Rivers's daughter Valencia, a single mother of two, died of Covid in an Atlanta hospital at the age of 35. Now Rivers, who's 60 and has arthritis, has sole responsibility for Valencia's two young children. |
She says her grandchildren keep her going: "It would be harder if I didn't have them with me and I was thinking about my child all the time." |
"When they feel bad, they say, 'Nana, I'm missing my mommy today,'" Rivers said. "I say, 'Do you want to talk about it?' Sometimes they say, 'No, I just want you to hold me.'" |
For both children and grandparents, Covid can be an inescapable topic, said Carolyn Taverner, co-founder of Emma's Place, a grief center for children and families on Staten Island. "It's all over the news; it's all anyone talks about. You never have a moment when something isn't reminding you of your loss." |
Organizations for bereaved children are there to help kids and grandparents cope. Ida Adams, 62, uses the services of a Baltimore-area family grief center, since her daughter died, leaving behind Kimiya, 13. Adams had to retire early to shoulder the responsibility. |
Even before the pandemic, an estimated 2.6 million American children already lived in "grandfamilies," where older family members helped fill in for absent parents. Now, the pandemic has made those needs even more pressing. |
"My parents are the ultimate safety net," said Nicole Lanza, a mother of two on Staten Island whose husband died of Covid-19. "They catch me before I realize I'm falling." |
 | | Joyous hugs at Auckland International Airport on Wednesday.Fiona Goodall/Getty Images |
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I live on Hawaii Island. Our mask mandate was just lifted, and anyone can now enter Hawaii without proof of vaccination. With the arrival of BA.2, it's like waiting for the other shoe to drop as cases increase in New York City and Washington, D.C. It frightens me. People are so quick to throw all precautions to the wind for their "freedom." It's tiring to wear a mask, but I will continue to do so until I see where infections are going. I don't believe it's over yet. — Mona Peck, Waikoloa Village, Hawaii |
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