The covid-19 pandemic would be a wake-up call for America, advocates for the elderly predicted: incontrovertible proof that the nation wasn’t doing enough to care for vulnerable older adults.
The death toll was shocking, as were reports of chaos in nursing homes and seniors suffering from isolation, depression, untreated illness, and neglect. Around 900,000 older adults have died of covid-19 to date, accounting for 3 of every 4 Americans who have perished in the pandemic.
But decisive actions that advocates had hoped for haven’t materialized. Today, most people — and government officials — appear to accept covid as a part of ordinary life. Many seniors at high risk aren’t getting antiviral therapies for covid, and most older adults in nursing homes aren’t getting updated vaccines. Efforts to strengthen care quality in nursing homes and assisted living centers have stalled amid debate over costs and the availability of staff. And only a small percentage of people are masking or taking other precautions in public despite a new wave of covid, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus infections hospitalizing and killing seniors.
Well, no, but that isn’t unique. Since the 80’s, really since the decline of the soviet union, we embarked on a mission to construct a society that prioritizes creating value for the shareholders first and always, and now, forty years later, that’s the society we have. We don’t really care about anyone except the shareholders and business owners, stakeholders be damned.
Just to elaborate on that point, at the very beginning when the shutdowns were being discussed, there were a bunch of older red state politicians who would have the means to isolate themselves saying that “we [not me though] elderly volunteer to die for the economy”.
I hope you dont imply the Soviet Union had any fucking thing to do with a better world and you used it purely to determine the time-scale to this decline.
I mean it did in a sense. The US gov was interested in scoring propaganda points by making the quality of life of Western people genuinely better.
I am implying that. The government and major corps had to persuade people that capitalism was a better system, and part of that meant that folks needed economic mobility, a high quality of life, and guarantees like retirement plans and social security. It’s no accident that the moment the USSR had one foot in the grave, we started just the first of many rounds of austerity and sacrificing all at the alter of the shareholder.
