Tag: pandemic

The Pandemic’s Unseen Toll

The headlines tell the big story: hundreds of thousands of people struck ill; residents of senior facilities dying in huge numbers; children unable to go to school; many workers losing their jobs; and people evicted from their homes. But there are smaller hardships from the pandemic, things that go unnoticed over time but can add up to big losses.

I think of friends who are grandparents who either don’t see their grandchildren or see them rarely and under controlled circumstances. Hugs and overnight visits are things of the past.  Over the long term, it means missing out on key elements of a child’s life: their first words, when they start school, when they make friends. These are life events that, once missed, can never be recovered.

I have friends who haven’t seen their adult children in more than a year because it’s too dangerous to fly during the pandemic. Phone calls and Zoom interactions can’t make up for being together for several days of intimate conversation and sharing favorite meals, going through old scrapbooks or visiting treasured places together.

The isolation is hard on every age group, but because older people are more vulnerable to the coronavirus, we are less inclined to get together with friends or family. Under even normal conditions, isolation increases as we get older and the rest of the world gets younger. But now, as we need to work harder to stay connected to the world, the pandemic is removing or lessening our connections. Research has shown that isolation negatively affects our health. How many people who are stuck home alone are slowly dying?

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Daily Life in the Pandemic

Visiting a historic town recently, I stepped into the town’s museum and cultural center. Immediately, the woman in charge asked me to sign the center’s register, so they could do contact tracing in case someone got the virus while visiting. A bit unsettled by that intrusion of reality while just wanting to enjoy something historic, I grabbed a pen to write down my name and address, but she groaned. I had picked up the pen from the “used” pile instead of the “new” ones, thereby potentially contaminating myself.

Through her mask, she tried to explain the current exhibit, but I didn’t comprehend everything she said. Somehow, I needed to navigate the rooms just right—clockwise, starting in one room and going to the next, and leaving by the back door. By that time, I felt slightly overwhelmed. How could something enjoyable—viewing paintings of the local area—turn into something that required me to think about every step I took?

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Who Lives? Who Dies?

At a time when our resources, especially medical, are being stretched thin, everyone from politicians to health care workers have raised the issue of who lives and who dies in this pandemic. It’s a choice doctors and nurses are having to make every day in hospitals that are overwhelmed with coronavirus patients and where ventilators and other medical resources are scarce. Some politicians have even suggested that the cost of a few elderly people dying is less than halting our whole economy. Younger people have referred to the pandemic as the “boomer remover.”

Although shocking, it raises the question: is a young person’s life more valuable than an older person’s? In strictly biological terms, the answer is yes, because younger people are able to perpetuate our species; they can have children and raise families and are able to contribute to the economy. Those of us who are retired, even if we volunteer, are taking more than we’re giving: living off the fruit of our life-long labors.

And yet there’s a cultural value to the accrued wisdom of older people. In more traditional societies, it was the elders who carried with them the vast knowledge of survival: where to find food and shelter and how to keep peace and when to make war. In the animal kingdom,  elephant herds are often led by the older matriarch, the one that knows, for example, where to find watering holes when the land is dry.

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