Even in the United States, Covid-19 seems to be gradually loosening and, thanks to the reopening of schools, the number of cars on the road is increasing every day.

What would in itself be good news, however, has a gloomy side effect: the number of children who lose their lives because they have been forgotten in the car under the sun has also started to rise again.

The last episode added to this blacklist happened a few days ago in Orange County, Florida, where a 1-year-old boy died of heatstroke.

The story that the American news reports are telling is, unfortunately, a perfect example of how dissociative amnesia works. The child had to be brought to the nursery by a relative – the chronicles have not yet revealed the degree of kinship – who, convinced that he had done his duty, left the child in the car under the sun for hours. It was only in the afternoon when the same relative showed up at the nursery to retrieve him, that the scale of the tragedy became clear. The baby never arrived at the facility and, having remained for hours in the car under the scorching sun, he died a tragic death, to say the least. Here you can read the complete news. 

So in the USA, the number of white deaths from neglect in cars in 2020 rises to 22. What is worrying is the recent upsurge: in the last 2 and a half months alone we are talking about 16 children who have died. As we said at the beginning, this is one of the dark sides of the “return to normality”. A trend that is worrying and which we hope will at least serve to reinvigorate the debate that, in the United States as in other countries of the world, is pushing for a law on the obligatory nature of an anti-abandonment system in cars for those who transport small children. The same law that has been in force in Italy for months and which has led hundreds of thousands of families to choose Tippy Pad and Tippy Fi.

For our part, we can only continue to document these horrors, because it is only by turning the spotlight on the problem that public opinion will be able to raise awareness and mobilise to solve it.