COVID-19 Babies

'It's a boy. It's a girl.'

It is new life, an occasion of great joy all over the world, especially for mothers, because some women die in childbirth. In Omo Ijebu, one of my favourite Yoruba movies, the woman died after giving birth in a strange land. The little girl survived. 

COVID-19 has shifted focus. We monitor its numbers: so many died in long term care homes, so many died after travel, so many died in Italy and U.S., so many health care workers died and so on.

There’s also new life, as women give birth, as we speak. This piece was prompted by a local hospital that mentions the other side of COVID-19: kids born during this traumatic time. 

‘Babies will continue to be born during this pandemic,’ a quote from a fund raising flyer for the St. Boniface Hospital Foundation, in Canada.

New means a perpetuation of the present. That is why we associate New Year’s eve with balloons, fireworks, popping champagne and dancing. Kids born on that day usually make headlines and we read about how many they are in a particular city.

Grandparents are close family and therefore have reason to celebrate the birth of their grand children. COVID-19 did not strike on New Year’s Day but, it was quite early in 2020, around late February. Because of the virus, some grandparents have not seen kids born in March and beyond. 

This breaks the cycle. The old cannot rejoice in new babies, hold them in their arms, feel the soft skin not yet tainted by air pollution and marvel how they look like the father. Funny though. I’ve never heard the look-alike being the mother, the person who carried the fetus for nine months.

Instead, COVID-19 news concentrate on numbers of senior citizens in Quebec and Ontario that have died or tested positive for the virus. They are no longer human beings that rejoice in the new life from their own children.

Old people have become just stats, because they are accessible. They are easily tested because they sit in one place such as old age homes. They are called ‘at risk’, while young people the majority of carriers who continue to defy preventative measures roam free, out of reach for COVID-19 testing.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.