The Picture That Made The Coronavirus Epidemic Hit Home

Old people don’t have much time left. The Administration is cheating them of what little they have.

Love is love. Especially at the end of life. I’d venture to say that we never need love in our lives as much as when we’re facing a lonely end.

The pandemic gripping our planet came home to me, along with the ruthless ineptitude and possible criminal neglect of our at-risk seniors when a photo of an elderly woman circulated on the Internet this week. This eighty-eight-year-old woman was trying to speak to her husband in his nursing home through a glass window. She couldn’t talk to him in person because these facilities are shutting down access to visitors.

Of all the grim stories I’ve been reading of the impact the virus has had on lives, communities and even countries now, this one hit me where I live. It jumped over concerns I have for my own well-being as someone in the high-risk demographic and friend in my agegroup. Yup, nothing reduced me to actual tears until I saw this photo.

I don’t have a loved one in a nursing facility, though I have had. I don’t have a partner to care for, to worry about, who might worry about me.

I don’t need to walk in that woman’s shoes to understand her anguish.

Or his, for that matter, already separated from all that he knew and loved by the decline of age.

How about this woman, if the plight of the woman trying to reach her husband through the window doesn’t move you. She usually visits her husband twice a day at his facility, where he waits out the storm of Parkinson’s disease.

She had to say goodbye to him when his facility barred visitors. “I don’t know when I’ll see you again,” she had to tell him. Perhaps her words mean nothing, as she suspects. But if there is some cognition left, imagine the disappointment he must feel. His only bright spot twice a day denied him now, by a disease he doesn’t even have.

The stories go on and on. The woman awaiting cancer treatment stuck on a cruise ship because the staff came on board from the ship quarantined in Japan because it was a hot bet of coronavirus cases. Whose idea was that we might ask?

Oh, let’s ask the pandemic experts in the Administration. What? They were let go two years ago to make room in the budget for the big tax cut?

So who did the president bring on board in case of an emergency?

No one? So what’s he doing to protect us from this scourge?

Proposing a payroll tax cut.

Got it. But I’m in the high-risk group. I’m 80-years-old. I have underlying health issues, and my current attack of shingles tells me my immune system is compromised.

I don’t know if I should go to the grocery store. How will the payroll tax cut help me navigate the virus?

Oh, I get it. I’m 80-years-old. I draw Social Security and Medicare, so I’m a drain on the economy. Plus, I’m a Democrat and not one of his supporters. Who cares how I navigate the virus, as long as I don’t keel over in the street and block traffic?

Newsflash for Trump, et al. My 80-year-old-life matters. As do that of my daughter and her husband’s, who happen to be in the high-risk group because of age.

I don’t know if any of the people I mentioned are Trumpers, but I don’t care. They are Americans and their lives matter. All our lives are in the hands of a man who golfs while we are knocking on the windows of nursing homes, hoping our loved ones know we haven’t forgotten about them.

I know, I know, Trump didn’t cause the virus. But listen to this from Michael Eliastam, a doctor friend of mine who quoted this on his Facebook page.

“Report on China from reliable (sic) source in South Africa:

ata released last week by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention discloses the coronavirus fatality rate for those infected in late December and early January was between 14% and 16% — far higher than the 2% first disclosed.

But mortality rates then plunged to 6% for January 11–20; 2% for January 21–31 and just 0.8% in early February. Outside of the Wuhan epicentre, the rest of China’s COVID-19 mortality rate is a modest 0.4%.

The reason is now clear: forewarned is forearmed. On returning from a fact finding visit to China last week, World Health Organisation assistant director general Bruce Aylward explained at a press conference that at first medical staff in Wuhan had no idea what they were dealing with. But they — and the rest of the world — are now fully aware of the symptoms and supportive care required to keep those on the critical list alive.”

Our government has known since December that a deadly, highly contagious virus was afoot, and also that they could take measures to contain it and safeguard the lives and well-being of its citizens.

Instead, we have chaos, panic, misinformation, and people prevented from visiting their elderly loved ones in care facilities.

Perhaps the markets would have nose-dived if Trump had shown true leadership, but experts say in lies and deflection from the truth, witness his refusal to allow the CDC to ban the elderly from flying (I can just hear that conversation — Trump: My friends own airlines. They’ll go bankrupt!), made the investors even more flighty.

I’m not an epidemiologist, or an economist, or any kind of health professional. I’m just a little old lady who is in the high-risk group from this virus. I recall my president saying there were twelve cases in the US and there would zero a week or so. That, when we knew the devastation it was wreaking in China.

Now we have 800 cases, double from the 400 three days ago. Do the math. i don’t believe in panicking. Hoarding isn’t going to help anyone, especially if we’re stripping items off the shelves that health care workers need and the rest of us may not — how about a scarf over your face to remind you not to touch your nose and mouth instead of a mask that’s in short supply.

If I knew daddy was home, I wouldn’t be worried.

But daddy isn’t home. Instead we have an inept, lying, greedy, corrupt, self-serving, science-denying, knucklehead in the White House making things worse by the day.

I’d send him the picture that so broke my heart, but he’d probably tell me it was Obama’s fault the guy was in the nursing home in the first place. Stop me before I tear my last hairs out of my old head.

I’m not a political writer. But sometimes, you’ve just got to rant. Here are some stories written with a cooler head. Enjoy.

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