Tessa Martyn’s former boss recently asked her if she’d like to go back to work this fall. Your answer was no. The job was with a childcare program in a middle-class suburb outside of Chicago; it was closed in March 2020. Martyn previously thought that despite her concerns about COVID-19, she would return this fall, perhaps in a role that limited her exposure to other people. But with the spread of the Delta variant, it is moving away from the local school where the program takes place. “Right now, the school with this new variant is the worst place,” Martyn told me.
Martyn is particularly tense when dealing with unvaccinated people: she lives with her family and her older brother takes immunosuppressants to prevent his body from rejecting a kidney transplant. (Although he received a COVID-19 vaccine, subsequent tests showed that he did not develop antibodies.) Of course, “unvaccinated people” currently include the approximately 50 million children in America who are under the age of 12 who are not eligible for a vaccination. Since this is also a population group in need of care, some educators fear infection with the highly transferable delta variant. Children and adults wearing masks reduce the spread of the coronavirus, and the risk of developing serious illness from COVID-19 is significantly lower in people who are fully vaccinated. But vaccinated workers like Martyn also fear becoming asymptomatic carriers of the virus and feel the risk of infection is too high. As a result, some of them are stepping out of the industry right at the moment when families desperately need them. That is quite understandable – but leaves parents of small children fewer and fewer opportunities to provide support.
Rasheed Malik, assistant director of research at the Center for American Progress, told me that Delta’s contagiousness and breakthrough infection cases are causing many childcare workers to rethink their work. “For a lot of people, the delta variant really changed the calculation. They saw this coming fall as a light at the end of the tunnel. Now it looks like last fall, ”said Malik. “At the moment there is a lot of uncertainty for child carers that is piled on insecurity.”
There was a lack of care prior to the coronavirus pandemic, compounded by the events of 2020. In some states, daycare workers were not classified as essential workers during last year’s closings and their workplaces were forced to permanently shut down. A study found that two-thirds of daycare centers in the United States closed in April 2020. Zachary Parolin, co-author of the study and assistant professor at Bocconi University in Italy, told me that 29 of all centers nationwide were closed or operating at half capacity as of June this year. He assumed that this number would increase in the coming months with the spread of the delta variant.
About 35 percent of educators lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic, and only about two-thirds have returned to their jobs, according to Malik. Many of these workers – including daycare workers, part-time babysitters and full-time nannies – have already been reluctant to return to their jobs and expose themselves to the coronavirus. Now Delta has reinforced that feeling. Before the pandemic, Sittercity.com, an online platform that brings families and babysitters together, had an average of one sitter for every five families in need of care. During the pandemic, this ratio worsened, dropping to one sitter for every 10 families. At the end of July, the ratio was 1 to 14, Zenobia Moochhala, the site’s CEO, told me.
Exhausted parents and a lack of educators ensure that they can freely choose their jobs, which gives them an unusual leverage effect in a typically poorly paid industry. In May 2020, child care workers earned an average wage of less than $ 12 an hour. According to the Health and Welfare Authority for Children and Families, annual sales in some childcare professions can be up to 30 percent.
Now, when deciding whether to take a job, these workers consider household safety and potential exposure to unvaccinated children. Many child carers work part-time with no benefits like health insurance, so the responsibility for safety in the workplace rests with the individual. Some nannies are also picky about the occupation of the parents they employ – medical carers and other public-facing workers may have a harder time finding care, said Jada Rashawn, a consultant at Sittercity.com.
Moochhala said the number of conversations between parents and carers about vaccination status has doubled since April, according to the company. And nearly 40 percent of the sitters surveyed on the platform said Delta made them either work for just one family – instead of three or four at a time – or refuse to work for families with unvaccinated members (excluding children under 12) to sit, said Moochhala.
For Brittney Kirton, the spread of Delta and the end of a nanny contract led her back to work as a newborn specialist in June, helping a couple who had just had a baby. In large part, this was because she expected the family to stay near home for the first one to three months after the baby was born. “As for COVID, this could potentially be the best way to limit external risk,” Kirton told me.
However, sometimes a personal cost-benefit analysis doesn’t make childcare a rewarding job when so much is at stake at Delta. Martyn has turned down babysitting jobs and even turned down dog sitter appearances for someone teaching young children. Although Martyn could potentially return to childcare in the future, she doesn’t think about it while the variant persists. Workers like them cannot be held responsible for not exposing themselves to unvaccinated children, just as parents cannot be held responsible for failing to vaccinate their young children. But not for the first time in the pandemic, all parties are on their own.
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