How Ageism Killed Older Adults During COVID: Nursing Homes During COVID-19 Lockdowns Were ‘crime scenes hidden from the public’; Transportation Worker Fails to Prove COVID Work-Related: Iowa Appeals Court, and other C-Virus related stories
How ageism killed older adults during COVID:
Nursing homes during COVID-19 lockdowns were ‘crime scenes hidden from the public’
In the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Margaret Morganroth Gullette immediately became concerned about older adults’ access to ventilators since a patient’s age was the only explicit reason someone could be barred access to those medical devices during a public health emergency.
Then her anger intensified as nursing homes became an epicenter of COVID-19 deaths. Among more than 1 million U.S. nursing-home residents, 8% or 179,000 people died as of May 2022. That compared to 0.33% of the overall U.S. population that was lost, Gullette found. Nursing-home residents were 26-times more likely to die than the general population, she said.
“There was this stereotype of people in nursing homes that they were going to die anyway. What everyone missed was that in 1,950 nursing homes no one died. And that’s out of 15,400 nursing homes. So it was possible to protect these people and when you protected them, they lived and survived,” Gullette said.
Gullette started writing and researching as a “passionate protest,” and what emerged was her recently published book “American Eldercide.” The book includes interviews with COVID survivors, family members who lost loved ones and health experts. It aims to put a name and face to those who were lost.
Gullette, the author of several books, including “Agewise,” “Aged by Culture,” and “Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People,” said she believes that fighting ageism will be one of the great public-health battles of the next few decades.
As more than 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day through 2027 and the nation will have more older adults than children by 2034, the healthcare system will be face-to-face with an aging population that it will be ill-equipped to handle, she said.
Gullette is pessimistic about the future of healthcare — she expects to see cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, more purchases of nursing homes by for-profit businesses and private equity owners, and an erosion of safety standards in nursing homes.
During the pandemic, when deaths in nursing homes rose sharply, Gullette said there was a lack of understanding and assumptions by the American public that the older adults were near death already, so not much could be done.
The lockdown stage of the pandemic added to the ease at which the public was able to shut out news of surging nursing home deaths, she said. —>READ MORE HERE
Transportation worker fails to prove COVID work-related: Iowa appeals court
A transportation worker who worked in an office and had traveled prior to his positive COVID-19 test in 2020 failed to prove he contracted the illness at work and is not eligible for workers compensation benefits for his long COVID symptoms, the Iowa Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday.
In affirming the state’s workers compensation commissioner’s ruling in Charles Collins v. Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority and West Bend Mutual Insurance, the court examined medical records, dates that other workers fell ill, and whether Mr. Collins and his family took precautions during the pandemic.
Mr. Collins had symptoms in the months prior to his documented infection but refused to take a COVID-19 test at that time, according to documents. He later tested positive when other workers became ill and the type of test he took accounted for the presence of COVID for several weeks, documents state. —>READ MORE HERE
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