How to protect seniors from coronavirus?

There’s much we don’t know about COVID-19, the new coronavirus, but one thing is clear: The risk for death rises with age. A report from the Chinese Center for Disease Control found that the fatality rate for people with coronavirus was under 0.5 per cent for people under age 50. But it rose to 3.6 per cent for 60- to 69-year-olds, 8 per cent for 70- to 79-year-olds, and a whopping 14.8 per cent for people 80 and older. (Those rates are likely inflated because many people with mild coronavirus have not been identified.) The death rate was also higher for people with underlying conditions like heart disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, high blood pressure and cancer, all of which are more common with age.

Those frightening numbers have organisations that work with groups of people over age 65 preparing for a potential onslaught of illness. People in nursing homes, who are often old, weak and sick, are at particularly high risk.

“It could be even worse for the people that we... take care of,” Mark Parkinson, President and CEO of the American Health Care Association (AHCA), which represents nursing homes, said last Wednesday. The group met with Vice-President Mike Pence and Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to talk about how the virus could affect its members. Retirement communities, assisted-living facilities and senior centres must also consider how to keep seniors

informed and minimise risk.

A COVID-19 outbreak at a nursing home in Washington state has driven home how serious the situation could be. As of Wednesday, seven residents of the Life Care Center of Kirkland had died of the new virus. The potential epidemic is hitting at a time when facilities that serve older adults have trouble recruiting and retaining staff. Widespread staff illness could make things worse.

While it is not yet known how long sick people can spread the virus, Steve Alles, director of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s disease control division, said employees should stay home at least until they no longer have symptoms, which could be

a week or more.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he said.

Retirement communities and nursing facilities are accustomed to dealing with other dangerous viruses, like the flu and norovirus, as well as weather that can disrupt staffing, said Dee Pekruhn, director of life plan communities services and policy, and Jodi Eyigor, director of nursing home quality and policy, for Leading Age. The group, which represents nonprofit retirement communities and aging services providers, has called for “calm preparedness.” — DPA

Stacey Burling