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Episode 018 Senior Citizens and COVID-19
Podcast Episode 18 Senior Citizens and COVID-19

Episode 018 Senior Citizens and COVID-19

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In this podcast episode, we spotlight how truly vulnerable our elderly folks are in our new COVID-19 normal.  

Links to articles referenced in the episode:

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hello! Welcome to the Sally in the Zen podcast. I’m your host, Sally. I’m a Zen Buddhist caregiver to my elderly folks and always in pursuits to find Zen moments in everyday living. If you’re new to the podcast, welcome! Glad to have you!  If you’re not new, and you’re returning, welcome back for another show!

Today’s show, I think, is going to get a little deep and a tad bit spiritual. And what I mean by that is, as we live in our new Coronavirus normal, there’s been a trend of something that I see only in movies.  Something that’s actually playing out right before our very eyes in the news, and it hits pretty close to home for me, in particular, as a caregiver to my elderly folks. And my elderly folks are also grandparents to a couple of lovely nephews.  

And the trend that I’m seeing seems to spotlight how especially vulnerable our senior citizens are in the midst of how the coronavirus is being handled.  So if you’re interested, let’s get going.

First off, let’s do a quick touch base of the latest milestones since our last episode.  So we just wrapped up our fourth week at stay-at-home under the stay-at-home order in the State of Pennsylvania, and the latest milestone that happened towards the end of the first week in April for us was that the CDC issue the recommendation for all Americans to wear face masks when they go outside of their home. Homemade face masks are encouraged because the official face mask should be worn by only medical professionals so more specifically, for normal common people like us, we’re encouraged to wear washable cloth face mask and leaving the normal surgical medical face mask to those professions because of shortages and outages all across the country.

So what we did was order our cloth face masks from Amazon and we did that a day or so before the actual CDC recommendation came out. And it was actually very specifically because of Zen Mum. Zen Mum was, besides being on the TV watching the news with Zen Master, 24/7, she had spoken with one of our family friends who scared the BeJesus out of her by saying when you leave the house, you must wear gloves and a face mask; and she was fit to be tied, and I was on the brink of needing to pull my hair out before, I’m like, okay, fine, let me go ahead and order something from Amazon.  And when we did, thank goodness, we did, yes, I know, okay, fine, I’ll give credit to Zen Mum’s panic, that even when she’s panicking, she has some kind of logic to it. That we got in there just in time because literally a day after our order, those particular face masks that we happen to pick up were sold out.  

So now every time we go out, it’s like become a military operation because I have to check myself. Do I have my face mask? Check.  Do I have my disposable gloves? Check. Do I have my baseball cap on? Check. That’s not necessarily a requirement to go outside but with the face mask alone, you kind of look ridiculous so you know, I’m kind of, yes, I’m vain, alright, fine, I need to have some semblance of looking like a semi decent bandit when I’m out there shopping for groceries with a face mask on.

So I have my money, my wallet, everything is good, my keys, and when I do go out, I try to keep Zen Mom and Zen Master at home and it’s really not necessary for them to be out and about with me.  And sometimes Zen Master would just pitch a fit at me because he feels that he needs to go out there with me, and I have to remind him that he’s old – he’s 77-78 years old – and he should have no business being out there, but older people think they’re impervious to stuff so it makes you wonder that if we’re going to be as stubborn as a mule as these people are when we get to be their age.  Fun times.

So on to today’s topic. Now we all know that the Coronavirus impacts everyone, especially the senior citizen population, the elderly population.  They’re more susceptible to the virus and more susceptible to dying from it. Everybody knows that; hence, the reason for the stay-at-home order and specifically, the senior citizens just stay home.

Now CNN recently had an article posted as of April 3rd and it’s entitled as”Coronavirus cases grow, hospital adopts a system to rank patients for treatment” And in the heart of the article, okay, let’s begin this, “with the peak of COVID-19 infections still ahead and medical supplies still scarce hospitals and physicians are gearing up for a nearly impossible challenge deciding who gets a life-saving ventilator and who doesn’t. The demand for ventilators have skyrocketed in intensive care units across the country as Coronavirus patients have flooded in. Typically adult patients will stay in the ICU and on a ventilator for only three to four days as one Connecticut doctor explains, but COVID-19 patients need them for up to two to three weeks, dramatically increasing demand.” Now Robert Truog (t r u o g), Director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, says American doctors may face new ethical challenges in trying to triage limited ventilators for COVID-19 patients. Dr. Truog said he worked all weekend helping hospitals develop policies that determine who receives intensive care during a public health emergency. One of the better frameworks to follow, he says, is one developed by Dr. Douglas White, a professor of critical care medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.  White said he began to develop his framework more than a decade ago during the Avian influenza epidemic. 

It is essentially a point system calculating a patient’s likelihood to benefit from ICU care based on two considerations: (1) saving the most lives and (2) saving the most life years. The lower the patient scores, the higher their prioritization for care and the system’s eight points scale, the first four points illustrate the patient’s likelihood to survive hospitalization, and the last four points assess whether assuming they survive hospitalization, they have medical conditions associated with a life expectancy of less than one year or less than five years. And in the event of a tie, this article continues, White’s framework directs doctors to consider life cycle with priority being given to younger patients.  And White is quoted as saying “these are inevitably tragic choices with only bad options but the only thing worse than developing a clear allocation framework is not developing one because then decisions made in a crisis will be biased and arbitrary.  

Now further down the article, several hundred hospitals around the country have adopted White’s framework.  The first set of hospitals includes Johns Hopkins and MedStar. And I’ll stop right there. I’ll of course attach the articles to the show notes for your reference.  

Now let me wrap up the second article that I came across and then we’ll have a discussion about this.

The second one was what Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said on March 24th and there’s two articles I’m going to reference about his comments; which we’re looking at the Vanity Fair article by Bess Levin, and it’s entitled Texas Lieutenant Governor said old people should volunteer to die to save the economy.  Now according to Dan Patrick, lots of grandparents are willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. Let me at this point just provide a little background color behind his comment and this is not referenced in the Vanity Fair article. 

The reason why he said what he said was that recession is in the horizon because of the fact that most of our states are stay-at-home. The actual statistic, according to Business Insider, 42% states, Washington, DC, Guam and Puerto Rico have issued stay-at-home orders, encouraging isolation measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.  In total, that brings about 95% of American population or about 306 million people under some sort of lock down. Businesses are shut down, mom and pop stores are shut down. The economy in general is at a standstill with unemployment skyrocketing.

Now according to Fortune magazine, an article posted on April 9th 2020 by Lance Lambert, real unemployment in the United States has likely hit 14.7%, the highest level since 1940. But that’s the backdrop of what we’re talking about here when he made that comment.  

Now when we go to the second article about what he said, this is also from CNN.  It’s by Paul LeBlanc printed on Tuesday March 24th also, the article says Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said Monday night that he’s quote-on-quote not living in fear of the novel Coronavirus pandemic and is quote-on-quote all in on lifting social distancing guidelines recommended by public health experts in order to help the economy.

Patrick who said he turns 70 next week would be among the high-risk population that is most affected by the coronavirus but he said people like him have to weigh the hazards of their personal health that the virus poses with the challenges to the health of the American economy brought on by its social distancing guidelines.  And he says in quotes my messages is that let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living, let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves but don’t sacrifice the country, end quote.  

The suggestion directly contradicts recommendations put forth by government agencies and public health experts. The CDC has been urging social distancing, defined as remaining out of places where people meet or gather and avoiding local transportation even if you don’t have any symptoms of the virus as a way to slow the spread of the disease.  The CDC has recommended that no gatherings of 50 or more people take place for 8 weeks and adults 65 and over stay home if possible. Further down the article, the CDC reports that 8 in 10 Coronavirus deaths reported in the US are among adults 65 years and older. And this is where I’ll stop reading from the article.  

Between the combination of what that Lieutenant Governor said and how the hospitals have a point system of who gets critical care, how I interpret that is that if you’re a senior citizen and you have the misfortune of getting the coronavirus and needing some sort of treatment, you’re low on the totem pole.  To me, it’s like leaving your life in the hands of Fate, whether or not you get medical treatments, or whether or not you survive without treatment. You’re essentially in the hands of Fate, and if you survive, then you’re blessed. If you don’t, then that’s par for the course of this kind of pandemic.

When I really think about the ranking system, it sounds, and I use this comparison when I write my blogs and my posts, that it’s almost like we’re living out some kind of a apoplectic movie where just unfathomable scenarios play out in the movies, and you don’t think about, certainly I don’t think about the possibility of these things playing out in real life but I’m seeing it here, that people’s lives are prioritized, for better or worse, there is actually a cold measurement on who lives or who dies.  That’s how I see this. That’s how I read all of this. And what’s impactful for me is that I’m not only Mom and Dad’s daughter and not only their Caregiver but the fact that they’re also the closest thing to me to God. But the ranking, the cold hard ranking of who gets what makes sense, it makes sense when you have zero emotion attached to it.

I have a 110% emotional attachment to this completely, to this discussion and that point ranking because Chinese people, and you can point to our culture for the daughter taking care of the parents and the children taking care of the older generation, that kind of thing, but they would, God forbid, if anything had to happen, they would of course say that senior citizens, the older population, should take the first step, if absolutely, absolutely necessary, for the next generation to continue on. Mom and Dad would absolutely sacrifice themselves for me and a future. 

But let me just say very clearly that sacrificing themselves for the economy is not in the question. I’m talking about a higher selfless sacrifice.

All of that is, if you take out the emotion, take your heart out of that, that’s what their wish would be. That for their sacrifice, I would live long and prosperous and have a good life at the expense of theirs.

I understand that sentiment, I understand that wish, if ever it came to something like that, but it’s hard to reconcile that kind of wish against my first instinct to throw myself after them over that cliff because I have zero want to be here by myself, without them.

You know how they say that before a person passes on, before they die, and that their life flashes before their eyes? This ranking, this point ranking and the comment made by that Lieutenant Governor was a play on my imagination because I have a pretty vivid imagination solely for the fact that I need to make sense out of my life. I need to understand the reasons and the meanings behind death, behind why people do and say what they say, that impacts you, takes the control of your own life out of your own hands. These kind of situations make me need to understand and make sense of these things for the fact that it’s not a simple decision as to your being denied medicine because you’re an old person.

For me, everything has a spiritual side to it, and for the next few minutes, I would like to spend the time to talk about that a little bit because that’s how I roll.  The fact that I’m a Zen Buddhist, there’s a lot of spiritual theories that I’m still learning. I am still a newbie with this because, that although I’ve been a Zen Buddhist all of my life, I started my spiritual journey in 2019 so I’m still relatively new and learning about concepts of life, existence, higher selves and whatever else. But more so that I believe not just the mortal existence that we as humans need to live here through physical suffering, through experiencing pain and all that kind of human tragedy, but there’s a spiritual side to this mortal suffering that we have to go through in order to reach enlightenment.  That’s basically the gist of Buddhism. You’re going through pain and suffering to reach the other side clean and enlightened and moving on.  

And Chinese people believe in reincarnation. That when the body dies, you’re reincarnated to another life, another person, another bug, another insect, another animal, whatever it is, but you’re reincarnated. That’s the theory. And despite my first instinct to want to follow them wherever they go and possibly waste their sacrifice, I’d probably come back reincarnated as a mosquito, and Pop would come back probably as an angry person with a lot of bug sprays so it’s all about karma. I make joke of this sometimes but sometimes I’m, I am serious behind my joking that I don’t think I’m going to be reaching my enlightenment anytime soon at this rate.

So on that note, that’s the end of today’s episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions or comments for me, just pop over to my blog Sally and the Zen.com click on the contact page and drop me a line. Depending on your question or comment, I could feature it on future episodes. We’ll see. Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me in today’s podcast and in my pursuits to find Zen moments in everyday living.  

Be safe, be healthy, be well, and I’ll talk to you all next time.

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