Advocates for the elderly predict 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 older adults.
The death toll was shocking, as were reports of chaos and isolation in nursing homes, senior citizens suffering from depression, untreated illness and neglect. Nearly 900,000 older adults have died from COVID-19 so far, or 3 out of every 4 Americans who have died in the pandemic.
But the decisive action that the advocates had hoped for has not been accomplished. Today, most people – and government officials – seem to accept Covid as a part of normal life. Many high-risk seniors are not getting antiviral therapy for COVID, and most older adults in nursing homes are not getting updated vaccines. Efforts to strengthen the quality of care in nursing homes and assisted living centers have stalled amid debate over costs and staff availability. And only a small percentage of people are wearing masks in public or taking other precautions, even as a new wave of COVID, flu and respiratory syncytial virus infections are driving hospitalizations and deaths among seniors.
According to data provided by the CDC, in the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people aged 65 and older lost their lives due to Covid – a group that is more than 10 times the number of large airliners. Could. But the alarm involved in plane crashes is notably absent. (During the same period, flu killed an additional 1,201 seniors and RSV killed 126.)
“It boggles my mind that there isn't more outrage,” said Alice Bonner, 66, a senior adviser on aging at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “I'm at the point where I want to say, 'What the hell is going on? Why aren't people responding and doing more for older adults?'”
It is a good question. Do we just not care?
I posed this big-picture question, one that is rarely asked amid debates over budgets and policies, to health care professionals, researchers, and policymakers who are themselves older and work in the field of aging. Have spent many years. Here are some of their reactions.
The pandemic made the situation worse. Carl Pillemer, 69, a professor of psychology and gerontology at Cornell University, said prejudice against older adults is nothing new, but “it seems more intense now, more hostile” than it used to be.
“I think the pandemic has helped perpetuate the image of older people as sick, vulnerable and isolated – as people who are not like the rest of us,” he said. “And human nature being what it is, we like people who are more like us and less favorable towards 'others.'
“Many of us felt isolated and at risk during the pandemic. It forced us to sit there and think, 'What I really care about is protecting myself, my wife, my brother, my kids, and protecting everyone else,'” says the 76-year-old author of nine books on aging and aging. said W. Andrew Achenbaum. An emeritus professor at the Texas Medical Center in Houston.
In an environment of “us against them” where everyone wants someone to blame, Achenbaum added, “Who is expendable? Older people who are not seen as productive, who consume resources. , they are believed to be in short supply. It's really hard to give older people their due when you fear for your existence.”
Although COVID continues to spread, disproportionately affecting older adults, “people now think the crisis is over, and we have a deep desire to return to normality,” said Edwin Walker, 67. , who leads the Administration on Aging at the Department of Health and Human Services. He spoke as an individual, not as a government representative.
The result, he said, is that “we haven't learned the lessons we should have” and the ageism that has surfaced during the pandemic has not diminished.
Ageism is widespread. “Everyone loves their parents. But as a society, we don’t value older adults or the people who care for them,” said Robert Kramer, 74, co-founder and strategic advisor to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care.
Kramer thinks the Boomers are reaping what they have sown. “We have chased the youth and glorified the youth. When you spend billions of dollars trying to stay young, look young, behave young, you create an automatic fear and bias of the opposite.
Combine the fear of decline, degradation and death that comes with aging with the trauma and fear generated during the pandemic, and “I think whatever progress we can make to meet the needs of our rapidly aging society “Covid has pushed us back in that.” , “It has further stigmatized aging,” said John Rowe, 79, a professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
“The message to the elderly is: 'Your time has passed, give up your seat at the table, stop consuming resources, get in line,'” said the 65-year-old, a health policy expert at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security. Anne Montgomery said. And Medicare. However, he believes that Baby Boomers “can rewrite and flip that script if we want to and if we work to change the systems that embody the values of a deeply ageist society. “
There is a need for integration, not separation. The best way to overcome stigma is to “know the people you are stigmatizing,” says G., 70. said Alan Power, a geriatrician and chair of aging and dementia innovation at the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging in Canada. , “But we isolate ourselves from older people so we don't have to think about our aging and our mortality.”
The solution: “We need to find ways to better integrate older adults into the community rather than moving them to facilities where they are isolated from the rest of us,” Power said. “We need to stop looking at older people only in terms of what services they might need and think instead about all that they provide to society.”
This point is a core tenet of the National Academy of Medicine's 2022 report Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity. Older people are a “natural resource” who “make important contributions to their families and communities,” the report's authors write in introducing their findings.
Those contributions include financial assistance to families, care assistance, volunteerism, and ongoing participation in the workforce, among other things.
The report concludes, “When older people thrive, everyone thrives.”
The coming generations will get their turn. Kramer delivers this same message in classes he teaches at the University of Southern California, Cornell and other institutions. “You have more at stake than I do in changing the way we approach aging,” he tells his students. “You are statistically more likely than me to live to be 100.” . “If you don’t change society’s view of aging, you will be doomed to live the last third of your life in social, economic and cultural irrelevance.”
As far as he and the baby boom generation are concerned, Kramer feels it is “too late” now to make meaningful changes in the future.
“I suspect that things may get much worse in the coming years for people of my generation,” Pilmer said. “People are greatly underestimating how much the cost of caring for the aging population will be over the next 10 to 20 years, and I think that will increase the struggle.”