There is a tension between opening up the economy and allowing the virus to spread. 90% of all deaths from COVID-19 are occuring in those over age 60. What is the value of a life? Are these older lives truly being valued as some areas are opening up even where COVID-19 case rates are increasing.
We are about to pass the sad threshold of 100.000 deaths in the USA. This is not a number, these are people. The USA suffers 30% of all deaths in the world from COVID-19 even though we are only 5% of the world’s population. The entire front page of the NYT today is a memorial to those lost in the pandemic.
In a bizarre way, the government is saving more one trillion dollars a year in social security payments because of these deaths. 90,000 of the deceased are over age 60, most over age 80. The average social security payment is $1500 per month. You do the math. It’s somewhere around $130,000,000/month “savings” to the government, much more than $1T per year.
We hear very little sadness or apology from the White House. There is no plan for routine testing in nursing homes. Do old lives matter?
Bravo for your message, Dr. deMaine! The value of older adults, world-wide, is more timely today I guess than it has been in a hundred years. In my fourteen years of great interest in this question, I have found that there is no topic people are more reluctant to talk about than how they will live when they are old or dependent on the personal assistance of others.
How then will the welfare of older adults improve if we go on this way?
I have come to see the question of the care of older adults as centered on two factors: fear and intimidation. We are afraid on losing what hold we have on our lives. We have had to learn to manage our lives and would cede that management to no one.
And we are afraid of those who would wrest that hold we have on our lives from us. We see that younger more agile people are organized to “care for” us and we are intimidated by those “caregivers.”
What most adults are not familiar with is the many ways those caregivers may have of intimidating us. Enter another major contributing factor. Many adults were not closely involved in the care of their elders. They may regret this, or they may have wanted it that way – and perhaps for sufficient reason. Either way, these adults may know some aspects of old age and be clueless about other aspects.
Most adults, then refuse to get involved with any talk of what might become of them. So they leave it to professionals – a formerly burgeoning industry – to become ever more powerful and frightening. And little “death cafes” are no solution. Open conversation, it seems to me, is the answer. Talking empowers us…even if only to know our own minds.
Luckily for all of us, the future of older adults can be an improvement on how it’s been. But only if we consider what we want our future to look like and what we must do to get there. They say there is no faster way to lose an audience than to ask them to do something. But if we don’t act like adults BEFORE we are dependent on others, those others will act in the vacuum we have left for them. They have been tightly organized in their own interest, knowing we will soon be incapable of acting in ours. They attend national conferences to strategize, while their clients protect their precious, fleeting independence. They have no greater fears than that we too might organize.
Sylvia
My sense is that not only is there more money to be made and redistributed to those who are well off when seniors die but also, no tears lost by this administration who realize more seniors would be voting against Trump in Nov. Any president who can ok caging children and harming citizens in peaceable protests, is capable of ‘dispensing’ elders.