Over the past week, elders living in long-term care facilities accounted for seven-in-10 Florida deaths resulting from the coronavirus, as the pandemic increasingly became a scourge of the old and frail. Though the cumulative overall number of deaths attributed to COVID-19, the illness caused by exposure to the coronavirus, doubled this month, coronavirus deaths at nursing homes and assisted living facilities tripled. As of Saturday, 1,228 people at long-term care facilities had died from COVID-19.
“I don’t know of any place else in the country that matches this,” said Larry Polivka, executive director of the Florida State University-based Claude Pepper Center, of the seven-in-10 figure. He has studied aging and long-term care issues for decades.
As Florida reopens, the deaths quietly keep piling up in nursing homes
www.miamiherald.com
Over the past week, elders living in long-term care facilities accounted for seven-in-10 Florida deaths resulting from the coronavirus, as the pandemic increasingly became a scourge of the old and fra...The United States has now recorded 100,000 deaths due to the coronavirus. It’s a moment to collectively grieve and reflect. Even as we mourn for those we knew, cry for those we loved and consider also those who have died uncounted, I hope that we can also resolve to learn more, test better, hold our leaders accountable and better protect our citizens so we do not have to reach another grim milestone.
Through public records requests and other reporting, ProPublica has found example after example of delays, mistakes and missed opportunities. COVID-19 has also laid bare many long-standing inequities and failings in America’s health care system. It is devastating, but not surprising, to learn that many of those who have been most harmed by the virus are also Americans who have long suffered from historical social injustices that left them particularly susceptible to the disease.
100,000 Lives Lost to COVID-19. What Did They Teach Us?
www.propublica.org
Each person who has died of COVID-19 was somebody’s everything. Even as we mourn for those we knew, cry for those we loved and consider those who have died uncounted, the full tragedy of the pandemi...Is Everyone Depressed?
Suddenly, many people meet the criteria for clinical depression. Doctors are scrambling to determine who needs urgent intervention, and who is simply the new normal.
Over the past month, Jennifer Leiferman, a researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health, has documented a tidal wave of depressive symptoms in the U.S. “The rates we’re seeing are just so much higher than normal,” she says. Leiferman’s team recently found that people in Colorado have, during the pandemic, been nine times more likely to report poor mental health than usual. About 23 percent of Coloradans have symptoms of clinical depression.
Is Everyone Depressed?
www.theatlantic.com
Suddenly, many people meet the criteria for clinical depression. Doctors are scrambling to determine who needs urgent intervention, and who is simply the new normal.Senator Claude Pepper is sorely missed.
For too long, we have not had a strong national voice for older people and those among them who need far more and better help with long term care needs than they are receiving. This fundamental fact, America’s growing unmet LTC needs, is being brought to our attention now by the horrifying number of nursing home residents becoming infected and dying during the pandemic. This article rightly points out that the conditions contributing to the terrible impact of the pandemic on nursing homes have been emerging for a long time in America. America has the worst LTC system among the wealthiest countries, a status achieved by spending a tiny 1% of our GDP on long term care services compared to 2-4% in European countries. We have sacrificed the needs of our older citizens, who’ve done so much to make our high standard of living possible, to cut taxes on wealth, reduce funding for public programs such as LTC residential and community based care, privatize as much of what’s left as possible, and rollback regulations of protecting quality of care. This has all contributed to the kind of failures described in this piece, and a growing level of unmet LTC needs in communities everywhere, certainly including Florida.
The writer is absolutely right that the state of LTC in America is a great moral failure that we are all responsible for either because some have actively pushed the austerity agenda and paid little to no attention to the steady erosion of LTC programs all around them for years. Out of sight, out of mind. Senator Pepper was the last strong national voice to make a powerful case for our moral obligation to care for our fellow humans in their last years. This is the moment when America needs another political leader to step up and fill the vacuum that has existed since Pepper died in 1989, and help us revive our roles as moral agents and take responsibility for the sorry, morally-indefensible state of LTC in America.
Opinion | What’s Behind the Nursing Home Horror
www.nytimes.com
After decades of mistreatment, older Americans are bearing the worst of the pandemic.Exactly right on. Our society doesn’t care about older citizens (or kids for that matter) or the people who care for them. Once you’re born, you’re on your own. If you can’t take care of yourself you are a burden, and will be treated as such.
When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how?
According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes. “When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins.
How Pandemics End
www.nytimes.com
An infectious outbreak can conclude in more ways than one, historians say. But for whom does it end, and who gets to decide?