Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi

Tessa Martyn’s former boss recently asked her if she would like to return to work this autumn. Her answer was no. The job was with a child-care program in a middle-class suburb outside Chicago; it shut down in March 2020. Martyn previously thought that even with her worries about COVID-19, she would return this fall, perhaps in a role that limited her exposure to other people. But with the spread of the Delta variant, she is steering clear of the local school where the program is held.

Margaret Licata has watched her husband’s dementia progress gradually over the past two decades—and now, during the pandemic, all at once.Joe Licata, 79, has frontotemporal dementia with aphasia, which means that he cannot speak or understand language. He began showing symptoms in his late 50s, when Margaret noticed a personality change: Joe would shrug off her attempts at conversation and seemed interested only in watching television.