Westneat: ‘Double pandemic’ burdens isolated elderly

He was citing the bleak odds to explain why he had refused to let any of his three sons visit him, even in a socially distanced manner. We had pressed him to let us come last summer — he lives in Ohio — and stay in a hotel, not the house, just so we could come by and chat outside, or go for a walk with him.

No, he had insisted, using his supreme authority dad tone.

“I’m a goner if I get this thing. Don’t come.”

The result is my dad basically hasn’t had any human contact since the coronavirus hit. We Zoom and we got him his first cellphone, so at age 91 he’s learned to text like a teenager. Friends sometimes stop by to talk at him through the front door. But I bet he hasn’t touched — or, more to his liking, really sat down and had an in-depth conversation with — another human being in nine months.

This is a part of the pandemic of 2020 that I don’t think we’ve really grappled with yet, as a society. For many, this has seemed like “pandemic lite.” Sure we work from home if we can, we wear masks, but deep down we’re not really that worried. Because unlike in the movie, the case fatality rate for this bug is a fraction, at 1.7 percent. If you’re under, say, age 50, the death rate is more than 100 times lower than it was in the movie.

But for old folks like my dad, there’s a Hollywood disaster-level contagion going on. According to the CDC, my dad is 630 times more likely to die from coronavirus, were he to catch it, than a 29-year-old.

What this means is a small segment of society, such as the elderly and the immunocompromised, has ended up bearing most of the pandemic’s emotional weight — the gut-level fear of the disease, for one thing, but also the extreme isolation and breakdown of social ties. A team of researchers at the UW published a study on this phenomenon, calling the effect for seniors a “double pandemic.”

It’s why in Italy they’ve created “hug rooms” at nursing homes, where you can embrace a relative across a protective screen. Any human contact, even through plastic, is desperately needed.

I think this is also why I unexpectedly teared up when I was watching on TV as one of the first shots was given to a 90-year-old woman in England. It hit me: Maybe my dad’s isolation could come to an end.

My dad is in “Phase 1B” for the vaccine, meaning he’s technically up next, after nursing home patients and health workers. He’s thinking maybe late January. This has made him hopeful, but paradoxically, even more on edge.

“You don’t want to go all this way and then slip up right at the end,” he said.

So his holiday season is, if anything, even more cut off. He gets his groceries delivered and he reads newspapers for like half the day — we joke that he’s single-handedly propping up my industry because he subscribes to three print papers.

But as he waits his turn in the vaccine line, as I imagine it is for the 19 million others over age 75 in phase 1B, everything else is canceled. They’re holed up, mostly alone and unseen.

In the movie, the shots cured everything. Credits roll. The end of the real-life pandemic won’t be so simple.