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The title of an article from the Center for American Progress says it all: “The Coronavirus Will Make Child Care Deserts Worse and Exacerbate Inequality.”

“As COVID-19 and stay-at-home orders to protect public health continue, a quiet crisis is unfolding in child care programs across the country,” the article says. “At the outset of the pandemic, nearly two-thirds of child care providers said they could not survive a closure that extended longer than one month. The Center for American Progress estimates that the country could lose half of its licensed child care capacity without government intervention.”

The center has a tool that shows where child care deserts were before COVID-19 — including like western Massachusetts — where more closures would make limited access even worse.

One possible outcome: inequitable access based on race and income. As the article explains:

“Without a significant public investment in a dedicated child care stabilization fund, child care closures will be concentrated in low-income and middle-income neighborhoods and many families will be unable to access child care assistance during a period of record-high unemployment. This could, in turn, make the reopening of the broader economy smoother in areas with adequate child care supply while businesses whose employees live in child care deserts may struggle to get parents back to work.”

“This research suggests that areas of the country with Black and Hispanic residents are also likely to experience worsening child care deserts during the pandemic, based on conditions that previously existed.”

The article calls for federal intervention to help address the nation’s diverse needs in cities and rural areas as well is in lower-income and minority communities.

Otherwise inequities could explode.

“Without federal intervention, it is possible that licensed, reliable, high-quality child care will become a privilege of the wealthy, while millions of young children will end up in care of uncertain safety, reliability, and quality. Child care deserts will become the norm, holding back millions of working families, particularly working mothers, in the middle-class communities that were already falling behind economically prior to the pandemic.”

Instead of watching deserts grow, federal action could keep child care programs running so they can engage children and give parents the ability to go to work – and help rebuild the COVID-19-ravaged economy.