GBO NEWS: COVID-19 Sources on Nursing Homes, Older Workers, Law, Vaccine Science, and Older Americans Act Reauthorization, Plus Reporting Awards, John Prine, LGBTQ Pioneer Phyllis Lyon & Some Talmudic Wisdom
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Our 27th Year.
April 16, 2020 — Volume 27, Number 5
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. To subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge, simply sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, you’ll receive the table of contents in an e-mail, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: Quarantined with Screen—America’s Introduction to Retirement.
1. COVID-19 SOURCES
*** “Nursing Homes & Covid-19: Top Priorities,” Key Analysis from the Altarum Institute’s Program to Improve Eldercare;
*** “Getting Ahead Of COVID-19 Issues: Dying From Respiratory Failure Out Of The Hospital,” by Altarum’s Joanne Lynne, MD, Health Affairs;
*** “What Will It Take to Get a Coronavirus Vaccine?” Former FDA Head Margaret Hamburg, MD, The Commonwealth Fund;
*** “The COVID-19 Crisis and Older Workers,” Podcast with the New School’s Teresa Ghilarducci,” by Mark Miller, Retirementrevised.com;
*** “Justice in Aging Rejects Ruthless Utilitarian Policies that Devalue the Lives of Older Adults,” Legal challenges on COVID-19 rationing attempts based on disability.
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE: *** Kentucky AP Names WKYU-FM’s Rhonda Miller Top 2019 Radio Reporter: *** Jewish Life TV’s Brad Pomerance Awarded for “Mental Health in Older Jewish Americans”; *** Encore Sets Deadline for $10,000 Gen2Gen Innovation Fellowships.
3. LEADS FROM LIZ: Liz Seegert offers More Coronavirus Sources, plus the Reauthorized Older Americans Act.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** “John Prine, Battling Coronavirus, Always Knew Loneliness as the Public Health Crisis It Is Today,” by Encore founder Marc Freedman, Newsweek; *** Phyllis Lyon, LGBTQ Icon and Former White House Conference on Aging Delegate, Dead at 95; *** The Talmud’s Wise Words for Times of Crisis.
1. COVID-19 SOURCES
*** “Nursing Homes & Covid-19: Top Priorities,” by Anne Montgomery and Sarah Slocum, Altarum Institute’s Program to Improve Eldercare, April 2020: Montgomery and Slocum, co-directors of the program, along with its policy analyst Joanne Lynn, MD, are highly respected sources on senior care. They write that while regulators turn their attention to nursing home infection control, “Penalizing nursing homes for outbreaks that they cannot always prevent is not a sound strategy.”
Montgomery and Slocum continue that nursing homes also should “encourage advance planning conversations and document residents’ wishes. Knowing in advance which residents do and do not want to transfer to the hospital and likely ventilator care will enable health care providers to make decisions honoring those wishes, and avoid using scarce medical resources for people who don’t want the intervention.”
They explain that stricter infection control, while important, “also has the potential to further isolate and close off nursing homes from the wider community. For both residents and staff, preventing this isolation – and the accompanying boredom, loneliness and helplessness that it brings – is the core work of culture change initiatives. . . . In the aftermath of the Covid-19 virus, ongoing restrictions on freedom of movement for residents are a real possibility.” They are piloting better approaches with Dr. Bill Thomas’ Eden Alternative in Michigan.
Their blog requests input from their Improving Eldercare professional network on members’ observations and ideas on such practical issues as having enough oxygen and other respiratory equipment for residents who develop respiratory failure.
Further, they advise, “Nursing home residents, their families, and staff will be highly stressed as they cope with this virus. Both the clinical challenges and social/emotional stresses will make providing care more difficult than ever, and short-term solutions, like isolation, will require concerted effort to undo and/or ease after the worst of the pandemic is over.”
*** Also, see Dr. Joanne Lynne’s blog, “Getting Ahead Of COVID-19 Issues: Dying From Respiratory Failure Out Of The Hospital,” Health Affairs (April 1): Lynn, for decades among the most respected physicians on end-of-life care, writes, “I am alarmed that we are not yet thinking ahead. Specifically, we are not:
- Determining care preferences for people at high risk of dying from COVID-19, so we know whether they want to endure hospitalization and life on a ventilator if they get a bad case;
- Getting ready to support peaceful course to death in homes and nursing homes for those who otherwise face suffocation;
- Preparing for prompt and appropriate care of dead bodies; and
- Developing the ability to test large numbers for immunity, since they could return to work and caregiving.
She explains, “Someone has to inform elderly or seriously ill people or their surrogate decision makers, help them to understand their situation, and then document their decisions. Having the opportunity to make decisions ahead of becoming ill with COVID-19 is especially important for those who decide not to take the conventional pattern of going to the hospital and/or being put on a ventilator. These discussions are difficult. Clinicians may find the advice for COVID-19 conversations on Vital Talk to be helpful. However, none of this is likely to happen broadly unless the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines start mentioning the urgency of these issues, and professional societies start reinforcing the message. Leaders on television and social media need to be willing to voice the merits of having these discussions and decisions now.”
Lynn’s article raises sharp questions gen-beat reporters can ask as the COVID-19 drama reaches, often too quietly, into facilities and private homes. She concludes, “When a person is likely to die if he or she gets this disease, we should be clear about what treatment the person wants. If the person is dying without ventilator support, he or she should have treatment to prevent feeling suffocation. Families and friends should have ways to grieve. Bodies should be able to be removed and buried or cremated promptly and safely. And we should be ready to test for immunity within a month. These things are foreseeable. Indeed, they are foreseen. It’s time for leaders to talk and to put plans in place. Let’s get ahead of this pandemic on these issues.”
She’s at drjoannelynn@gmail.com, mobile 202-297-9773. And check out her Medicaring www.medicaring.org]program for perspectives on eldercare reform.
*** “What Will It Take to Get a Coronavirus Vaccine?” A Q&A with former Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD, The Commonwealth Fund, conducted by Sarah Klein and Martha Hostetter (April 14, 2020): Hamburg, who headed FDA in the Obama Administration, begins, “So far, the process has been remarkably fast, with a huge mobilization across sectors and borders. Within about nine weeks of Chinese scientists publishing the genome of the virus in January, one company moved into phase 1 clinical trials. Around the world, scientists are developing more than 50 candidate vaccines, some of which are moving quickly toward clinical trials. All of this is happening at a pace we’ve never seen before.”
*** “The COVID-19 Crisis and Older Workers: A Conversation with Teresa Ghilarducci,” by Mark Miller, Retirementrevised.com (April 10, 2020): Miller’s weekly podcast includes his interview with labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor at the New School for Social Research in NYC, where she directs the school’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, and its Retirement Equity Lab (ReLab). The 32-minute audio-cast covers her research on older workers under the cloud of Covid-19, and also the impact of the economic and market crashes on retirement savings, home equity and health care spending. Although some content is by subscription only, Miller is making all of the pandemic content available to anyone. Journalists who have problems accessing it or who have question can send a note to mark@retirementrevised.com.
In the podcast interview, Ghilarducci says her crew is analyzing data for two groups, “those on the sidelines and those on the front lines.” She continued, “We were “surprised to see that . . . those on the front lines, such as personal care and home health care, janitors, . . . long-haul truck drivers, the one’s you don’t ever see . . . and utility workers . . . are disproportionately older. They are interacting with people and they are riding public transit and they are working close together.” Ghilarducci stopped for a moment, then went on to say, “I’m getting a little emotional, because every single time they interact with customers and colleagues, they are much at risk of being in contact with those who are shedding the virus.
She added, “We’re finding with our data that they often have people at home. . . often people who are immuno-compromised because of diabetes of other kinds of things. So they are full-time, front-line workers and part-time care workers. And they are furious that the legislation, so far, has not given them two things that they need: They need paid leave to quarantine themselves or to take a break to care for people who are. There’s paid sick leave in that legislation that’s very narrow and did not affect them. And they also did not get protective gear.”
Ghilarducci also recently posted a provocatively headlined op-ed on Forbes, Useless Retirement Advice And Bad Government Policy In The Time Of COVID-19.
*** “Justice in Aging (JiA) Rejects Ruthless Utilitarian Policies that Devalue the Lives of Older Adults” (April 4, 2020): The public-law nonprofit, Justice in Aging, notes complaints about health care providers rationing care away from patients with more severe disability levels, including many elderly people. This release states that “care must be provided without consideration of age or age-related criteria, including criteria that cannot be operationalized without using age as a proxy. Care must be based on individualized assessments that consider an individual’s prospects for recovery and allocate treatment to help the person survive rather than focusing allocation on ‘number of years of life’ or ‘quality of life’ factors.”
JiA cited the recent Department of Health and Human Services guidance reminding providers, states and others that discrimination on the basis of disability is impermissible, which HHS issued “after calls from disability advocates that bias be eliminated in the rationing of health care and accommodations during this crisis.” JiA added that due to bias unique to aging, “the health care civil rights protections enjoyed by people with disabilities stems from Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, a statute that protects older adults from age discrimination as well. For more information reporters can contact JIA Litigation Director Regan Bailey at rbailey@justiceinaging.org or Communications Director Vanessa Barrington, vbarrington@justiceinaging.org; (510) 256-1200.
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** STORIES BY TWO 2019 JOURNALISTS IN AGING FELLOWS WIN:
* Kentucky AP Names Rhonda Miller Top 2019 Radio Reporter: Rhonda Miller of Public Radio’s WKYU-FM, Bowling Green, earned First Place–Radio Reporter in the Kentucky Associated Press Broadcasters competition for 2019 coverage. AP’s awards list, announced April 10, also shows Miller winning a trio of individual story awards on her coverage of issues in aging, the first two of those following produced with fellowship support:
Her story, “Looking for Workers? An Owensboro Program is Training Local Senior Citizens to Fill Positions,” took Second Place in the Long Public Affairs category. The judges commented: “An important topic that isn’t straight forward to cover. Good use of a scene in the beginning. Additionally, nice work expanding the topic to a global level.” Miller also picked up Third Place kudos for her three-part documentary series, “Elder Refugees in Kentucky Face Challenges Related to Language, Hunger, and Isolation.” And garnering Third Place in the Short Serious News Feature bracket was “Kentucky Has Highest Rate of Food Insecurity for Residents in Their 50s.”
And garnering Third Place in the Short Serious News Feature bracket was “Kentucky Has Highest Rate of Food Insecurity for Residents in Their 50s.”
* Brad Pomerance’s Documentary “Mental Health in Older Jewish Americans” for Jewish Life Television (JLTV) snagged the Award of Excellence from the Religion Communicators Council. The organization’s top honor in the Broadcast/Cable Television category included kudos for Pomerance, as senior producer and narrator, and Kevin Wegener as the program’s editor. The 42-minute production ran as an hourlong special with commercials in JLTV slots on many Comcast and other cable system’s nationally throughout 2019. The program can be viewed at http://jltv.tv/page.php?id=143&play=329.
Both Miller and Pomerance developed their stories with support from Journalists in Aging Fellowships sponsored by GBONews.org’s parent Journalists Network on Generations and The Gerontological Society of America, with funding by the Silver Century Foundation.
*** Gen2Gen Innovation Fellowship: Have you covered—or do you know of—a strong effort toward intergenerational solutions in areas ranging from literacy to loneliness, housing to health care, education to the environment? Encore.org will select 12 Gen2Gen Innovation Fellows “of all ages and from all backgrounds, sectors and walks of life,” to receive $10,000 awards and participate over nine months starting in Fall 2020 in a program offering individual and group professional counselling and national networking aimed at enhancing and expanding the quality of selected programs.
According to Encore.org’s release, “Creating a post-COVID world that puts generational connection and collaboration front and center in ways that benefit all ages, solve critical social problems and mend our fraying social fabric. Connections between generations were strained before Covid-19. Since then, physical distancing has created more division, disconnection, ageism and loneliness — all while reminding us how much we need one another.” Fellowship application will open on June 1. “To get the latest information about applying, sign up here.”
3. LEADS FROM LIZ: More Coronavirus Sources
By Liz Seegert
While you were sheltering…
I hope everyone is doing well and is healthy. We’ve been on PAUSE in New York State since mid-March, and even for a long time work-at-home journalist, I have to admit the walls are beginning to close in.
We’ve learned that “social distancing” finally seems to be working, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, which is really good news for those of us monitoring the situation from the Big Apple. Our health system is bursting at the seams, refrigerated trucks are holding body bags, and we’ve been calling in reinforcements from U.S. Army. (The Navy, too, although we wish Cpt. Brett Crozier and others quarantined on Guam or elsewhere a speedy recovery.) New York is no different than many other hot spots — we are just among the first, and there are more of us.
Meanwhile, there’s been plenty of news on aging to monitor. Much of it is COVID-19 related — outbreaks at nursing homes and assisted living facilities, dilemmas about whether to move mom or dad back home (be aware and prepared for what you may be getting into, warns KHN’s Judith Graham) and relaxation of Medicare and Medicaid rules for telehealth, scope of practice, and testing, among other regulations.
There’s also plenty of non-COVID aging news to keep up with, especially the reauthorization of the Older Americans Act signed by the president on March 25. I wrote about it for the Association of Health Care Journalists. (By the way, AHCJ is offering a half-price six-month membership to non-health reporters so they can access an extensive array of COVID-19 resources).
If you really want to dive into the weeds, the Administration for Community Living (ACL, which includes the Administration on Aging) posted tables for State and Tribal Organization funding of social service programs. It’s been updated to include additional money from the Coronavirus Relief (CARES) Act.
Congress passed the Older Americans Act in 1965 to provide community health and social services for older adults. It gave states authority for community planning and social service, research and development projects, along with personnel training in the field of aging. The Older Americans Act, or OAA provides a majority of social and nutrition services to older adults and their caregivers. It authorizes a wide array of service programs through a national network of 56 state and territorial agencies on aging, 629 area agencies on aging, nearly 20,000 service providers, 244 tribal organizations, and two native Hawaiian organizations representing 400 tribes, according to ACL.
The OAA also offers community service employment for low-income older Americans, training, research, and demonstration activities in the field of aging; and vulnerable elder rights protection activities. This legislation boosts program funding 35% over five years, including for services to assist those with younger-onset Alzheimer’s, increases focus on social determinants and on isolation; provides more help to grandparents raising grandchildren; gives more support to age-friendly communities. Bob Blancato, long a prime advocate for senior causes in Washington, recently wrote in Next Avenue and MarketWatch that the reauthorized OAA also includes a host of other provisions to help those over 65.
Some 11 million people ages 60-plus and their caregivers currently rely on the OAA. With the economy in virtual free-fall, you can almost hear the sound of social service budgets being ripped up en masse. That’s one reason this law is so important — it ensures that even in a recession, millions of vulnerable older adults will still receive nutritious meals, be able to get to their medical appointments, and help families keep their loved ones out of institutional care as long as possible.
When we eventually enter a post-COVID-19 world, it will be interesting to see how these programs fare in a new economic reality. It’s one story idea to hold in your inbox. Meanwhile, stay safe, everyone… and don’t forget to wash your hands!
“Leads From Liz” columnist Liz Seegert is program coordinator for GBONews.org’s parent, the Journalists Network on Generations. A New York-based freelance journalist, she is also editor of the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Core Topic section on Aging.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** “John Prine, Battling Coronavirus, Always Knew Loneliness as the Public Health Crisis It Is Today,” by Marc Freedman, Newsweek (April 7, 2020): Freedman, founder and CEO of Encore.org, wrote this thoughtful tribute, which appeared the day the beloved singer-songwriter died from complications of COVID-19 at age 73. Freedman recalled first hearing Prine’s now classic song about old age and loneliness, “Hello in There,” a few years ago while driving to see his father, who was declining in a nursing home.
Freedman recalled hearing the song on the care radio: “It was an all-too-fitting prelude to my father’s lonely, isolated days in the nursing facility.” Prine sang:
Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello.”
In a 2016 interview, Freedman added, Prine said, “I’ve always had an affinity for old people. I used to help a buddy with his newspaper route, and I delivered to a Baptist old people’s home where we’d have to go room-to-room. And some of the patients would kind of pretend that you were a grandchild or nephew that had come to visit, instead of the guy delivering papers. That always stuck in my head.”
Freedman, author of How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations (Public Affairs, 2018), continued, “Let’s be glad Prine’s music about older people, and the socially isolated more broadly, is finally getting the attention it deserves. Loneliness is a public health crisis too, and Prine knew it.”
*** Phyllis Lyon, LGBTQ Icon and Former WHCoA Delegate, Dead at 95: This editor doesn’t even have to close my eyes to hear Phyllis Lyon’s explosive laugh. GBONews readers who don’t recognize her name have likely seen her photo taken while she and her late partner Del Martin became the first same-sex couple to be married by San Francisco’s then-Mayor (now California Governor) Gavin Newsom. Obits on her death, April 9, in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and other media understandably focus on Phyllis and Del’s pioneering activism for LGBTQ rights, but I loved watching them go into action as fellow delegates to the 1995 White House Conference on Aging (WHCoA).
Phyllis was one of the first friends I met soon after arriving in San Francisco, in late 1967. I was in the Resistance Against the Draft and served three-years at the progressive Glide Memorial United Methodist Church and Glide Urban Center. Phyllis was an administrative assistant, who later co-founded the Institute for Human Sexuality. A UC Berkeley journalism graduate and former reporter, Phyllis coauthored Lesbian/Woman with Del, which was among the first nonfiction books about the lives and challenges of non-heterosexual women. Glide Publications issued the book in 1972, and Bantam co-released it with Glide in a mass-market edition. It would be named by The Advocate among its 100 best nonfiction books on lesbian/gay life and rights. (Glide also published Del’s book, Battered Wives, among the first volumes about spousal abuse, in 1975.)
Although there’s a profusion of material online about their accomplishments on LGBTQ rights (an alphabet soup that had not evolved when I first knew them), one chapter in their story not getting mentioned much involves their advocacy at President Bill Clinton’s 1995 WHCoA. I was then the editor of Aging Today, newspaper of the American Society on Aging, based in San Francisco.
The main task of delegates was to propose, debate and adopt resolutions on the future of federal policy in aging to be presented to the administration and Congress. Heading into the three-day event, a nervous policy committee approved several resolutions for consideration by the 2,250 delegates, calling for multicultural diversity in policies on aging. But in doing so, political centrists on the conference’s policy committee had excised the phrase “sexual orientation” from each diversity reference. I watched as Phyllis and Del worked the hallways of the Washington Hilton, where the conference took place, to lead a successful battle to reinstate sexual orientation as an element of American diversity worthy of legal protection.
It’s a stock line to day, she “will be missed,” but I’ll always be able to stop and hear Phyllis’s big and boisterous laugh, a fighter’s laugh, for what’s just.
*** The Talmud’s Wise Words for Times of Crisis
Do Not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now.
You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.
Thanks to Eileen Beal for sharing this passage
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2020 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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