Elderly people and coronavirus: It’s the worst disaster of the pandemic. But WHO chief says our lack of concern shows ‘moral bankruptcy’

CNN — They are among the greatest victims of coronavirus, yet elderly people continue to be dismissed, despite growing evidence of the devastating effects the pandemic has had on them. Earlier this week, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he had heard people describing high Covid-19 death rates among older people as “fine.” “No, when the elderly are dying it’s not fine. ‘How much is a life worth?’ When Sweden took the controversial decision not to lock down, the country’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell told a local newspaper that its Public Health Agency “didn’t know that there would be such a big potential for the disease to spread in elderly care homes, with so many deaths.” But he said the country’s main strategy of social distancing still “worked well” and he “can’t see that we should have done it in a completely different way.” Tony Abbott, the former Prime Minister of Australia, suggested in a speech in the UK on Tuesday that some elderly coronavirus patients could be left to die naturally. Abbott said governments were not “thinking like health economists, trained to pose uncomfortable questions about a level of deaths we might have to live with.” And he said that even if Australia’s lockdown had prevented a predicted 150,000 deaths, the $300 billion cost to the country worked out at $2 million per life saved – or $200,000 per year if they only had a 10-year life expectancy, adding that such a price was “substantially beyond what governments are usually prepared to pay for life-saving drugs.” ‘A rich life’ It’s an argument that’s given short shrift by Robin Hall, a care home manager in southern England, who said elderly residents were “much more capable than people think of having a rich life.” “You can live in a care home and you can thrive,” said Hall, the bursar at the Home of Comfort in Portsmouth. “For care homes, it’s been catastrophic both in terms of the people that have died, but also in terms of the people that have survived but not been able to access and the care and the quality of life that they would normally expect,” Adam Gordon, professor of the care of older people at the UK’s University of Nottingham, told CNN.