"The deaths included three men, ages 91, 89 and 86, and four women, ages 74, 77, 94 and 81. The 91-year-old man and the 74-year-old woman had underlying medical conditions. It was not yet known whether the other five had underlying health problems."
Newspaper report on recent COVID deaths
American seniors are being put out on the ice to die.
The Inuits really did this. At a time of famine or when the burden of caring for a person was too great, sometimes they abandoned the frail on the ice or in the wilderness, presumably to die. They stopped doing it under pressure from White missionaries, who found the custom objectionable.
Above I quote from a story in the Medford Mail Tribune, but I could have chosen other media reports from local TV stations' news departments, or news stories from any other media market in the country. There is a standard format we see everywhere: Announce the COVID death by reporting the age and presence of "underlying morbidities."
There is a message imbedded in the message. We are reminded that it is killing a subset of Americans: old people, sick people, and in some areas of the country Black, Hispanic, and Native American people. The unsaid message: COVID is killing them, not us. Or maybe some very unlucky, rare number of us, but mostly people who are other, distinguished by their being off the team, usually by being aged out. There are a lot of people over 65--the heightened danger range--and overweight people, and people with diabetes and heart problems and other "co-morbidities" among America's top policymakers and officeholders. People will die, they assume, but someone else. They will be like Trump, maybe, sick for a day or two, then bounce back fine. Or maybe like Boris Johnson who went to the ICU but was OK, after all. Or like Baron Trump, barely sick at all. People in power have great medical care.
It isn't just policymakers who think in terms of it being the person off the team who does the dying. It is a great swath of American voters.
We have enough experience with COVID reporting to believe that people who are at risk of the ICU and death are already on death's door. The unsaid part of it is that these people are dispensable, and certainly not worth destroying the economy and the lives of the young and healthy 90% in order to protect them. After all, they were already old and sick. Their age and health status were the story.
American voters are making a choice with their votes and their behaviors, deciding that old people need to get out of the way. The election gave tough news for Democrats who hoped rejection of Trump personally would pull down Trump-ism and its policies toward the vulnerable along with him. It didn't happen. Democrats lost House seats. State legislatures grew more Republican. In polls Americans said they agreed with Fauci overwhelmingly. In the election, though--and in the Thanksgiving travel and in personal behavior generally--people are showing that they are long past being tired of COVID social distancing rules and want to live their lives, risk be darned.
That is the Trump position. Let's go back to work, America. If a few old folks die, well, OK. Policymakers are not saying the "OK-death" part aloud. Indeed, they deny it, save every life, blah-blah, sure. No news story says that it is OK that people age 85 are dying, but they mention the age and co-morbidity in the report. People "get it." It is embedded like a silent letter. "A Medford woman, age 91, died at a nursing facility. She had co-morbidities."
A house-cleaning is taking place. The country's policies have been skewed toward seniors (who get benefits) and against working people (who pay for them but get fewer of them) and it is being adjusted right now by off-loading people too expensive to support. COVID does in two weeks for Medicare costs what cancer, heart disease, and kidney failure take years to do. Social Security pays pensions--and Medicaid pays for nursing home care--perhaps for decades--until COVID cuts short the costs. Public Employee Retirement pension systems nationwide underestimated longevity and overestimated investment returns, but COVID re-adjusted mortality tables back down, for the first time in a century. COVID is doing the work elected officials and policymakers cannot dare vote to do: Rebalance the cost of senior benefits.
I urge readers not to mis-interpret this observation. I am not happy about COVID, nor am I praising it or its effects. I am 71, and vulnerable. My own politics lean toward protecting the vulnerable, even though it is expensive, which I acknowledge squarely. Describing effects is not wishing them. I am attempting to understand and describe what is happening. People who consciously voted to protect the unborn simultaneously voted--perhaps with less mental acknowledgement, but just as certainly--for policies that endanger and will kill tens of thousands of living seniors.
America put seniors on the ice. We became too big a burden.
6 comments:
There is a lot of truth here, in public perceptions and reactions.
But it is really Covid that is putting the elderly (particularly) on the ice to die, and these so-called “nursing homes” where it so often happens, are a dismal business already.
Covid has a peculiarly different impact than past pandemics. What it precisely does is double the risk of death across the age spectrum.
So, a child has generally a tiny tiny risk of death, and doubling that has a tiny impact on the population. The point of “age and comorbidities,” though it telegraphs as uncaring, is actually the application of that doubling of death risk. An 80-year-old has a dramatically higher risk of death than a child, and that is what we see here.
No prior pandemic functioned this way,
What you describe is a dystopian descent into barbarism. Unlikely, but certainly imaginable.
I think what you are sensing is simple ageism. This society, its culture, is skewed towards younger people by every measure. The paradox of modern public health is that we all live longer, but the economics dictate that at some point one must leave the workforce to make room.
We retire, and always relinquish our position to someone younger.
What then?
Anyway, COVID is not as bad as it could have been. The next one might be worse so any discussion of whose vulnerable and who isn't is cavalier at best.
Seniors get benefits, so do younger people, but much of the seniors' "benefits" are delayed compensation for a lifetime of productive work. It's not a freebie, nor are we seniors willing to be sacrificial victims for the trust fund balances of the wealthys' offspring.
Time to re-watch “Logan’s Run” and “Wild in the Streets.”
“Fourteen or Fight.”
When my wife fell and broke her femur she went to a so called rehabilitation facility to heal well enough to go home since my care would have been feeble at best. The lovely dump she stayed in was Avamere At Three Fountains which is now the rehabilitation facility making the news in Jackson County; there staff and residents have tested positive for Covid and are quietly dying one after the other. Usually these facilities are for temporary care for those suffering heart attacks, strokes, knee replacements ect. until they can be sent home. My wife had to walk up stairs before she could leave. One nurse who never left her station was” in charge” of about 50 +patients. If you had to be assisted to go to the bathroom you rang a buzzer over and over again until you did it in your bed or on the floor trying to get to the toilet. The aids were untrained, paid very little, and overworked. The smell of urine filled the hallways. In short, a terrible experience.
Why? It’s all about corporation bottom line. Skimp and save, Bill medicare or Medicaid high and deliver low ... bad food, ect. I will say the physical therapists were terrific.
In Amerika when you fall out of the production line you become a burden on society.
You become invisible. Medicare will care for you for eight weeks after leaving the hospital; after that your care is on your own until you deplete your bank account and then you can become a ward of the state on Medicaid (Oregon Health Plan). Care then really tanks. Just try to find a Dr who will take an Oregon Health Plan patient. Dental work...forget it.
We don’t like the stink of the old in our society. Amerika loves Botox , capped teeth, and breast implants. Old movie stars appear on the cover of the AARP magazines. The poor who are dying now live in areas without fresh food markets, can’t afford to visit a doctor and pay for prescriptions , so yes they are overweight from processed food, live from paycheck to paycheck, and in crowded conditions. Safety nets have vanished thanks to the cuts in aid to dependent children. This class struggle includes the old. Vanish, go away, we can’t see or hear your needs. You are barely on the production line with your shrinking social security check and disability payments. Ask a vet. They commit suicide at a rate of 20 + a day. Covid cries out for the weak and infirm and they deserve to die.
They are not part of Moloch any longer.
Sent from my iPad
Peter, I recognize the value you put on this oft repeated story is purely for the purposes of setting up your argument. That said, it is salacious chauvinism to attribute it to Arctic culture and there's simply no need for you to continue using what at best may have been a fictitious account supplied to Victorian audiences who were of that mindset.
I hasten to add most hunter gatherer cultures don't coddle their elders but those who survive infant and childhood mortality are robust and/or valued for their contributions.
Regards
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