The COVID-19 pandemic could be a wake-up name for America, advocates for the aged predicted: incontrovertible proof that the nation wasn’t doing sufficient to take care of weak older adults.
The demise toll was stunning, as have been studies of chaos in nursing properties and seniors affected by isolation, melancholy, untreated sickness, and neglect. Around 900,000 older adults have died of COVID-19 to this point, accounting for 3 of each 4 Americans who’ve perished within the pandemic.
But decisive actions that advocates had hoped for haven’t materialized. Today, most individuals — and authorities officers — seem to just accept COVID as part of peculiar life. Many seniors at excessive danger aren’t getting antiviral therapies for COVID, and most older adults in nursing properties aren’t getting up to date vaccines. Efforts to strengthen care high quality in nursing properties and assisted dwelling facilities have stalled amid debate over prices and the provision of employees. And solely a small proportion of persons are masking or taking different precautions in public regardless of a brand new wave of COVID, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus infections hospitalizing and killing seniors.
In the final week of 2023 and the primary two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 folks 65 and older misplaced their lives to COVID — a gaggle that will fill greater than 10 giant airliners — in line with knowledge offered by the CDC. But the alarm that will attend aircraft crashes is notably absent. (During the identical interval, the flu killed a further 1,201 seniors, and RSV killed 126.)
“It boggles my mind that there isn’t more outrage,” mentioned Alice Bonner, 66, senior adviser for growing older on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “I’m at the point where I want to say, ‘What the heck? Why aren’t people responding and doing more for older adults?’”
It’s a great query. Do we merely not care?
I put this big-picture query, which hardly ever will get requested amid debates over budgets and insurance policies, to well being care professionals, researchers, and policymakers who’re older themselves and have spent a few years working within the growing older subject. Here are a few of their responses.
The pandemic made issues worse. Prejudice towards older adults is nothing new, however “it feels more intense, more hostile” now than beforehand, mentioned Karl Pillemer, 69, a professor of psychology and gerontology at Cornell University.
“I think the pandemic helped reinforce images of older people as sick, frail, and isolated — as people who aren’t like the rest of us,” he mentioned. “And human nature being what it is, we tend to like people who are similar to us and be less well disposed to ‘the others.’”
“A lot of us felt isolated and threatened during the pandemic. It made us sit there and think, ‘What I really care about is protecting myself, my wife, my brother, my kids, and screw everybody else,’” mentioned W. Andrew Achenbaum, 76, the creator of 9 books on growing older and a professor emeritus at Texas Medical Center in Houston.
In an setting of “us against them,” the place all people needs in charge any person, Achenbaum continued, “who’s expendable? Older people who aren’t seen as productive, who consume resources believed to be in short supply. It’s really hard to give old people their due when you’re terrified about your own existence.”
Although COVID continues to flow into, disproportionately affecting older adults, “people now think the crisis is over, and we have a deep desire to return to normal,” mentioned Edwin Walker, 67, who leads the Administration on Aging on the Department of Health and Human Services. He spoke as a person, not a authorities consultant.
The upshot is “we didn’t learn the lessons we should have,” and the ageism that surfaced throughout the pandemic hasn’t abated, he noticed.
Ageism is pervasive. “Everyone loves their own parents. But as a society, we don’t value older adults or the people who care for them,” mentioned Robert Kramer, 74, co-founder and strategic adviser on the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care.
Kramer thinks boomers are reaping what they’ve sown. “We have chased youth and glorified youth. When you spend billions of dollars trying to stay young, look young, act young, you build in an automatic fear and prejudice of the opposite.”
Combine the concern of diminishment, decline, and demise that may accompany rising older with the trauma and concern that arose throughout the pandemic, and “I think COVID has pushed us back in whatever progress we were making in addressing the needs of our rapidly aging society. It has further stigmatized aging,” mentioned John Rowe, 79, professor of well being coverage and growing older at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“The message to older adults is: ‘Your time has passed, give up your seat at the table, stop consuming resources, fall in line,’” mentioned Anne Montgomery, 65, a well being coverage knowledgeable on the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. She believes, nevertheless, that child boomers can “rewrite and flip that script if we want to and if we work to change systems that embody the values of a deeply ageist society.”
Integration, not separation, is required. The finest option to overcome stigma is “to get to know the people you are stigmatizing,” mentioned G. Allen Power, 70, a geriatrician and the chair in growing older and dementia innovation on the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging in Canada. “But we separate ourselves from older people so we don’t have to think about our own aging and our own mortality.”
The resolution: “We have to find ways to better integrate older adults in the community as opposed to moving them to campuses where they are apart from the rest of us,” Power mentioned. “We need to stop seeing older people only through the lens of what services they might need and think instead of all they have to offer society.”
That level is a core principle of the National Academy of Medicine’s 2022 report Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity. Older persons are a “natural resource” who “make substantial contributions to their families and communities,” the report’s authors write in introducing their findings.
Those contributions embrace monetary assist to households, caregiving help, volunteering, and ongoing participation within the workforce, amongst different issues.
“When older people thrive, all people thrive,” the report concludes.
Future generations will get their flip. That’s a message Kramer conveys in courses he teaches on the University of Southern California, Cornell, and different establishments. “You have far more at stake in changing the way we approach aging than I do,” he tells his college students. “You are far more likely, statistically, to live past 100 than I am. If you don’t change society’s attitudes about aging, you will be condemned to lead the last third of your life in social, economic, and cultural irrelevance.”
As for himself and the newborn growth technology, Kramer thinks it’s “too late” to impact the significant modifications he hopes the long run will carry.
“I suspect things for people in my generation could get a lot worse in the years ahead,” Pillemer mentioned. “People are greatly underestimating what the cost of caring for the older population is going to be over the next 10 to 20 years, and I think that’s going to cause increased conflict.”
(KFF Health News, previously referred to as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a nationwide newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about well being points and is without doubt one of the core working applications of KFF — the impartial supply for well being coverage analysis, polling and journalism.)
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Source: www.bostonherald.com”