Washington’s rollout hasn’t always been smooth, according to some activists representing communities of color who pushed for it. Washington, for example, became the first state to put multigenerational households near the top of its COVID-19 vaccine priority list on Jan. But it is not among the states that prioritized multigenerational homes for vaccination. Wisconsin this month expanded vaccine eligibility to all state residents ages 16 and older, and it has funded programs to narrow the state’s wide racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccinations. Just a handful of states have formally recognized COVID-19’s threat to multigenerational households and prioritized them for vaccination. The CPI analysis of every county in the United States shows that people of color, at greater risk from the virus for a variety of factors, are far more likely to be living in the same home as older relatives: 30% among Latinos, 25% among Asians and 24% among Black families, compared to 15% for non-Latino white households. That includes parents and adult children as well as families that extend from grandparents to grandchildren. households are multigenerational, containing at least two generations. The Center for Public Integrity found that 18% of U.S. “It was a panic moment of ‘Okay, I’ve had an exposure, and I don’t know it, and now I potentially exposed everybody in the household.’”įor some, multiple generational homes common And that’s a very strong smell,” explained Brown. “I remember kind of panicking one morning, because I had a bag of licorice and I had gotten a piece of the licorice out of the bag and I couldn’t smell it right away. Brown recalls one such scare, which turned out to be a false alarm. Multigenerational households also often include essential workers, such as Brown, who are at greater risk of bringing the virus home.
Studies in the United States and the United Kingdom found that older members of multigenerational households are at increased risk of death from COVID-19 - and ethnic and racial minorities are more likely to be part of such living arrangements.
No one in the Brown household has gotten sick from the virus.īut many families in Wisconsin, nationwide and elsewhere have not been so lucky. Their oldest child, who is 20, has not yet gotten the vaccine. Brown, her 43-year-old husband and her father-in-law have received all of their shots. And that was for use if you had a known COVID-positive patient, otherwise, we were working in a surgical mask,” said Brown, 43. “We were given one N95 and told to reuse it until it became visibly soiled. But Brown feared the exposure to patients and the lack of personal protective equipment in the early part of the pandemic put her family at risk. “We did tell the kids to kind of stay away from dad and not be climbing on him.”īrown’s job as a forensic nurse examiner at UnityPoint Health-Meriter Hospital, where she cares for individuals suffering from sexual or and physical assault and violence, created another level of concern.ĭuring the pandemic, she regularly monitored herself for the virus. “The kids would go down there and they would see what he was up to,” Brown said, adding that her father-in-law often played guitar for the children or designed math games on the computer for them. But the virus caused them to change family life as the younger elementary-aged children were warned from spending too much time close to their grandfather, who lives in the basement of the family’s three-level condominium.
The family - including her husband, David Bingham Brown and their children Ash, Alaric and Victoria and a cockatoo named Casper - moved to Madison in 2014.įor Brown and her husband, this type of family dynamic was nothing new both had lived with grandparents during their childhood. Since COVID-19 hit, her concerns about her family have grown as their multigenerational household works to stay safe from the pandemic, especially her 79-year-old father-in-law, who has chronic pneumonia and a heart arrhythmia.īrown and her family welcomed her father-in-law, David Ralph Brown, into their family home back in Kentucky after the death of his wife in 2010. For many years, Cassilyn Brown’s home in Madison has housed three generations, including her husband, three children and father-in-law.
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