I n January 2020, just weeks before the NBA shut down and Costco shelves emptied and Tom Hanks got sick, Joy Corbitt’s only brother died in his mid-forties with symptoms of Covid . Which meant, from the pandemic’s earliest days, Joy was taking no chances.

She’d heard that Black and brown people like her seemed to be getting sick and dying at higher rates than other Americans. And that kids were either not getting sick, or getting less sick, or getting sick in ways we didn’t really understand. So, when it came to protecting her then-14-year-old daughter Lia, the North Carolina mother was vigilant.

“I was consumed with the news — consumed with the numbers,” Joy says.

As one week of lockdown slogged into the next, Lia, a straight-A student, struggled through that chaotic, ever unmuted,

See Full Page