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Advocates for the elderly are predicting that the Covid-19 pandemic will be a wake-up call for America: irrefutable evidence that the country is not doing enough to care for vulnerable seniors.
The death toll was staggering, with reports of elderly people in nursing homes suffering from loneliness, depression, lack of treatment and neglect. So far, nearly 900,000 seniors have died from Covid-19, accounting for 3 out of 4 American deaths in the United States. Epidemic.
But the critical steps advocates had hoped for failed to materialize. Today, many people – and government officials – seem to accept Covid as a normal part of life. Many high-risk seniors don’t take antivirals Treatment of covidAnd most seniors in nursing homes don’t get it. Improved vaccines. Efforts to strengthen the quality of care in nursing homes and assisted living centers have been stalled by debate over costs and staffing. and a A small percentage of people New outbreaks of covid, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus infections are hospitalizing and killing older people who are wearing masks or taking other precautions.
In the year In the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people 65 and older died from VV — a group that fills more than 10 major airlines — according to data provided by the CDC. But the alarm that monitors the plane’s accidents is not particularly present. (During the same period, the flu killed an additional 1,201 seniors, and RSV killed 126.)
“It boggles my mind that there is no more outrage,” said Alice Bonner, 66, a senior adviser on aging at the Institute for Healthcare Reform. “what is it? I’m at the point where I want to say. Why don’t people respond and do more to adults?’
That’s a good question. Don’t we just care?
This big-picture question, rarely raised in the midst of debates over budgets and policies, is for health care professionals, researchers, and policymakers who have spent many years working in the field of aging themselves. Here are some of their responses.
The epidemic made it worse.
Prejudice against adults is nothing new, but “it feels more hostile now,” he said Carl Pillmer69, professor of psychology and gerontology at Cornell University.
“I think the pandemic has helped to reinforce images of older people as sick, frail and isolated – people who are not like the rest of us,” he said. “And human nature being what it is, we tend to like people who are similar to us and have little inclination for ‘others’.
“Many of us have felt isolated and threatened during the pandemic. “It made us sit there and think, ‘I’m really worried about protecting myself, my wife, my brother, my kids, and keeping everyone else safe,'” says W. Andrew Achenbaum76, author Nine books of Aging and Professor Emeritus at the Texas Medical Center in Houston.
In an “us against them” environment, where everyone wants to blame someone else, Achenbaum continues, “Who’s going to pay? Older people who are not seen as productive, consuming resources that are believed to be in short supply. It is very difficult to give the elderly their due rights when you fear for your own survival.”
Although Covid continues to spread, affecting the elderly disproportionately, “now people think the crisis is over, and we have a deep desire to get back to normal,” he said. Edwin WalkerThe Department of Health and Human Services led the administration of aging 67. as an individual, not a government representative.
“We haven’t learned the lessons we should have,” he said, and the aging population that occurred during the pandemic has not abated.
“Everyone loves their parents, but as a society we don’t value the elderly or the people who care for them. Robert Kramer74, co-founder and strategic advisor at the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care.
Cramer thinks boomers are reaping what they sowed. “We chased the youth and celebrated the youth. When you spend billions of dollars to be younger, to look younger, to be younger, you automatically build in fear and prejudice.
Combine the fears of decline, decline and death that can cause growth with the trauma and fears that have occurred during the pandemic, and “I think Covid has set us back in terms of addressing the needs of a rapidly aging society.” John Rowe, 79, a professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, is more critical of aging.
“The message to the elders is: Your time is up, leave your seat at the table, stop consuming wealth, get in line.” Anne Montgomery65, health policy expert at the National Committee to Protect Social Security and Medicare. But she believes baby boomers can “rewrite and flip that script if we want to.”
The best way to overcome isolation is to “get to know the people you are isolating,” says G. We have power, 70, is a geriatrician and the Innovation Chair in Aging and Dementia at the Schlegel University of Waterloo Research Institute in Waterloo, Canada. But we separate ourselves from the elderly so that we don’t think about our own aging and our own mortality.
The solution: “We need to find ways to better integrate seniors into the community as opposed to moving them to campuses where they are isolated from the rest of us,” Power said. “We need to stop looking at older people only through the lens of what services they might need and think beyond what they provide to society.”
That point is the main guideline of the National Academy of Medicine’s 2022 report. A global roadmap for healthy longevity. Older adults are a “natural resource” who “make significant contributions to their families and communities,” the report’s authors wrote in announcing their findings.
Those contributions include financial support for families, caregiving support, volunteering and continued participation in the workforce, and more.
The report concludes, “When older people get older, everyone gets better.”
That’s the message Kramer delivers in classes he teaches at the University of Southern California, Cornell and other institutions. “You have more trouble changing your approach to aging than I do,” he told his students. “You have more luck Statistically, to live over 100 than me. If you don’t change society’s perception of aging, you are condemning the last third of your life to be socially, economically, and culturally inappropriate.
As for himself and the baby boom generation, Cramer thinks it’s “too late” to make the important changes he hopes to bring about in the future.
“People in my generation, I suspect that things will be much worse in the coming years,” said Pilmer. “People are greatly underestimating the cost of caring for older people in the next 10 to 20 years, and I think that’s going to increase conflict.”
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