In a recent blog post a fellow genealogical blogger made a point about elder people being a disposable generation, with infection rates of Covid-19 soaring all around them and transmission mainly by younger people being careless.
https://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2020/09/no-longer-silent-or-boomers-we-are-now.html
We are possibly not so much disposable as forgotten.
If you are a retiree, then you have likely already been more at home that you were a few years ago. If you are lucky, your children and grandchildren live close by and you can visit them while maintaining a family bubble. Larger gatherings, though, are not permissible, whether by government edict or just common sense.
If your family is not near where you live, as ours are, you are pretty much out of luck. Younger families, as they should, have their own concerns, with work, social networks and school-aged children. Our children stay in touch regularly by telephone, video chats and social media connections. But it is not the same as when we could all travel and visit in person.
I often wonder if this is how we are going to spend our twilight years – basically in isolation.
The second wave is upon us with a vengeance now, as was predicted last spring. This one is much worse, again as I think we knew it would be given the pattern of previous pandemics.
In the province of Alberta, not unlike other jurisdictions, we are seeing records for confirmed new cases and hospitalizations set almost every day. More rigorous rules were instituted last week so it will be a while before we know whether they will have any impact on altering the trend.
And once again, it is cutting a swath through continuing care homes, as one newspaper headline pronounced yesterday. It seems we – and I mean those in charge whether at municipal, provincial (state) or federal level – have not learned anything from the first wave. No new rules were put in place to prevent the spread through care homes, even though we knew that the elderly were particularly vulnerable to this disease and that those confined to long-term facilities were really in jeopardy as they could not escape the wave of infections.
In Alberta, 66% of the 590 covid-19 related deaths so far have been people aged 80 or over. And 64% of the total have been linked to long-term care and supportive living sites – patients and health-dare workers. These are disturbing numbers and quite likely were entirely avoidable if more attention had been paid to changing the way these facilities operate after what happened earlier in the year.
In the City of Calgary, as shown below, there are outbreaks in most continuing care facilities, with 36 deaths. The dark blue areas are the hardest hit areas for case numbers. Other cities in the province have similar numbers.
Overall, in most areas around the world, this second wave threatens to overwhelm health systems. And yet there are still those people out there who refuse to accept the situation as being real, as being dangerous or as being something they have any responsibility to change their habits for. The anti-maskers, for example, are out in force, whining about their rights having been abrogated. It’s as if they do not recognize that there are other ways to voice their opinions on masks or restrictions on gatherings other than showing up in large super-spreader mobs. They are mostly younger people, too, who think the health emergency does not impact or apply to them.
Vaccines appear to be on the way now with a few countries approving their use. But the numbers of individual doses that will be available mean that it could take a year before most of the population of any region has been immunized. We still do not know how long these vaccines will last, though. Or whether the expectations of how effective they are indicated to be will be true. But at least it’s a light at the end of a tunnel.
Notwithstanding all of this, Christmas will be very different this year. It will be the first that we will not share in person with any family member. That’s going to be sad.
I hope the “Forgotten Generation” fares well through Christmas into the vaccination era and that somehow measures can be taken to diminish the strain, stress and death-rates for this (our) group of people.
