As frequently reported in the Trends Journal, it has been well known for months that the population most vulnerable to dying from COVID-19 are the elderly, particularly those in nursing homes with significant health conditions.
This first came to light in March, when Italy, suffering the worst death toll from the virus after it spread from China, reported the average age of Italians dying from COVID-19 was 80 years old.
On 13 April, the International Long-Term Care Policy Network found that in Ireland, which had the most accurate data collecting at the time, 54 percent of deaths from coronavirus occurred in elder care homes.
And, according to a London School of Economics report, Italy, Spain, France, Ireland, and Belgium have 42 to 57 percent of virus deaths from elder care homes.
Thus, about 50 percent of the COVID-19 victims were from nursing homes.
Don’t Tell Anyone
Yet, for months, nursing homes in the U.S. have not been required to report data on deaths from coronavirus.
Only recently, on 8 May, did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally get around to making it mandatory for nursing homes to report this data. Even this was a weak move by the CDC, as its new order does not require elder care facilities to send it reports before 17 May.
Initially, the CDC had issued a rule that nursing homes were to send in this important information dating back to the beginning of the year, but that rule was optional. Many facilities opted not to comply.
David Grabowski, professor at Harvard Medical School, stated on 22 May, “We’re gong to get a very incomplete picture of the pandemic in nursing homes because facilities don’t have to submit information about the early impact of the virus. How do we understand what’s happening if we only have data back to early May?”
To date, only 36 states are submitting data, and less than half of those are identifying individual nursing home locations.
TRENDPOST: Considering nearly 50 percent of those dying from COVID-19 are elderly people from nursing homes suffering from chronic illness, and the others are diabetics, obese, suffering from respiratory ailments, heart disease etc., the actual death rate of the total global population is minuscule.
Thus, politicians shutting down the global economy and enforcing a variety of made-up social distancing, mask wearing, and other laws was, and is, unwarranted, destructive… and far more deadly than the virus.
