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Covid deaths skew older, reviving questions about ‘acceptable loss’

Kenneth Griffin

HR Legend
Jan 13, 2012
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President Biden may have declared the coronavirus pandemic “over,” but from John Felton’s view as the Yellowstone County health officer in Billings, Mont., it’s not over, just different.
Now, more than ever, it is a plague of the elderly.
In October, Felton’s team logged six deaths due to the virus, many of them among vaccinated people. Their ages: 80s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 90s. They included Betty Witzel, 88, described by her family as a tomboy who carried snakes in her pocket as a child and grew up to be a teacher, mother of four, grandmother of nine and great-grandmother of five. And there was Nadine Alice Stark, 85, a ranch owner who planted sugar beets and corn.
Yellowstone County made the decision early in the crisis to recognize each death individually, and Felton said that is as important as ever to acknowledge the unrelenting toll on a still-vulnerable older generation, while most everyone else has moved on.

“I think about someone’s grandfather — the plays they wouldn’t watch, the games on the football field they wouldn’t see,” he said.

More than 300 people are still dying each day on average from covid-19, most of them 65 or older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While that’s much lower than the 2,000 daily toll at the peak of the delta wave, it is still roughly two to three times the rate at which people die of the flu — renewing debate about what is an “acceptable loss.”

And while older Americans have consistently been the worst hit during the crisis, as evident in the scores of early nursing home deaths, that trend has become more pronounced. Today, nearly 9 in 10 covid deaths are in people 65 or older — the highest rate ever, according to a Washington Post analysis of CDC data.

Some epidemiologists and demographers predict the trend of older, sicker and poorer people dying at disproportionate rates will continue, raising hard questions about the trade-offs Americans are making in pursuit of normalcy — and at whose expense. The situation mirrors the way some other infectious diseases, such as malaria and polio, rage in the developing world while they are largely ignored elsewhere.

The omicron variant of covid-19 has spun off into dozens of immune-dodging subvariants. The Post's Frances Sellers explains the threat of these new strains. (Video: Jackson Barton, Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University, argued that it is possible to keep the economy open while still aggressively pursuing a national booster campaign and requiring masks in health-care settings and nursing homes, for example. But U.S. leaders have chosen not to do so, he said. That worries him.

“There’s a bit of ageism, so to speak, attached to it,” he said, adding, “People, even if they are older, they still have as much claim to live as me.”

In an open letter published Oct. 7 in the BMJ, formerly the British Medicine Journal, Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, and about a dozen other experts emphasized that “pandemics do not end with a flip of the switch.”

“Despite the widespread belief that the pandemic is over, death and disruption continue,” they wrote.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and other officials have justified their pandemic reset by emphasizing that Americans have more tools to fight the coronavirus than they did a year or two ago. This includes not only vaccines, booster shots and rapid tests, but antiviral pills that can be taken at home and have been shown to greatly reduce severe illness and death if taken early.

“We can now prevent almost all of the deaths that are happening,” she said at a news briefing this month.

However, Walensky acknowledged that deaths among the elderly, especially those with multiple chronic conditions, is “a real challenge.”

“An additional infection,” she said, referring to covid-19, “is something that may turn something they are able to stably live with to something they are not.”

New ‘normal’​

Epidemiologists tend to divide the pandemic into three distinct periods. In the first year, from March 2020 to March 2021, the United States experienced about 500,000 deaths. The toll was about the same the following year. In the third year, the nation is on track to lower that count significantly, to 150,000 to 175,000 deaths — barring a curveball in the form of a new variant.

That means that coronavirus is likely to rank third as a cause of death this year. By comparison, heart disease and cancer kill roughly 600,000 people each year; accidents, 170,000; stroke, 150,000; and Alzheimer’s, 120,000. Flu, in contrast, kills 12,000 to 52,000.

A recent CDC report on covid-19 mortalitycontained more good news — most notably, a rapid drop in deaths beginning in March that led to a relatively stable period from April through September when there were 2,000 to 4,500 deaths weekly.

But the reduced death toll has not been experienced equally among all age groups.

Unlike flu, which impacts both the very young and the very old, the coronavirus appears to put mostly older people at higher risk of severe disease and death. The proportion of deaths among those 65 or older has fluctuated from eight out of 10 in the first few months of the pandemic, to a low of 6 out of 10 when the delta wave struck in the summer of 2021, to a high of 9 out of 10 today.

Last month, people 85 and older represented 41.4 percent of deaths, those 75 to 84 were 30 percent of deaths, and those 65 to 74 were 17.5 percent of deaths, according to a Post analysis. All told, the 65-plus age group accounted for nearly 90 percent of covid deaths in the United States despite being only 16 percent of the population.

The vulnerability of older people to viruses is neither surprising, nor new. The more we age, the more we accumulate scars from previous illness and chronic conditions that put us at higher risk of severe illness.

When it comes to the coronavirus, though, deaths in Americans over 65 fell dramatically after the arrival of the original series of vaccines since seniors were the most likely to get them. But booster rates for older Americans are now lagging: According to the CDC, 98 percent of those ages 65 to 74 and 96 percent of people 75 and over completed an initial two-shot course. Those rates fall to 22 and 25 percent respectively for the new omicron-specific booster.

To minimize further loss of life ahead of a feared winter surge, the White House announced Tuesday that it was launching a six-week push to increase booster uptake in seniors and other groups that have been disproportionately affected.

“The final message I give you from this podium is that please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get an updated covid-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible, to protect yourself, your family and your community,” Anthony S. Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said during the briefing, billed as his last before he retires next month.

 
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Covid and age
The issue of age and the pandemic has been a source of tension throughout the pandemic.

When hospitals were hit with a crush of patients in the spring of 2020, some of the debates about allocating scarce resources centered on age. In documents drafted by some medical institutions, “stage of life,” a proxy for age, was sometimes recommended to be used as a tiebreaker in decisions about who should get a ventilator or a bed.

A number of experts, including Liao, expressed discomfort with such rankings. “I really disagree with that view,” he said. “You can imagine a 70-year-old who can do everything — can enjoy friendship, read books and go to movies.”

Jo Rowland, parish nurse at the Harvest Church in Billings whose job includes supporting congregation members and their families through covid illness and death, said society failed many of its elderly in another way, too: through safety protocols at the beginning of the pandemic that left them to die alone.

As more continue to fall victim to the virus, she said, we need to be more thoughtful about how to celebrate their lives and treat their deaths with dignity. “It’s a different type of grief losing an older person,” she said.

While some fault covid-19 policies for not doing enough to protect the elderly, others criticize age-based policies implemented elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, for example, a matrix of recommendations based on age left some seniors feeling they were being discriminated against. Even as stores and restaurants began to open in the summer of 2020, the National Health Service still advised people 70 and olderto stay home or “shield.” In Colombia, the government sought to protect older people by closing centers that offered activities for them through August 2020. The policies became controversial for restricting freedom of movement.

Elfriede Derrer-Merk, a geriatric nurse from the University of Liverpool, and others wrote in a journal article in August that many older people felt angry and frustrated that their individuality was ignored.

The “undifferentiated way in which especially the role of age as a risk factor was discussed, and the inclusion of all people above the age of 65 into one homogeneous risk group, often neglected … the diversity of older people and their characteristics and thus drew criticism for fueling ageism in society,” the authors wrote.

‘You don’t matter’​

Tara Swanigan’s father was in the first wave of deaths that occurred in 2020.

Charles Krebbs had celebrated his 75th birthday shortly before he was infected in July. He had retired from his job as an appraiser in Phoenix and was spending his time reading, gardening, picking up his grandson from school and accompanying him to his football games. He was strong and extraordinarily healthy, Swanigan recalled, but the virus nonetheless ravaged his lungs and he had to be put on a ventilator. He died that August.

Swanigan said she was heartened to hear about President Biden’s campaign to encourage older Americans to get booster shots. But she and other members of Marked by Covid, a nonprofit founded by two women who lost parents to the virus, advocate for more protections for people who are vulnerable, such as additional coronavirus testing. She continues to be shocked by how callous some people have been when she has talked about her father’s death. “Well, your dad was super old,” she recalled one man telling her on social media.

“For seniors and the immunocompromised, it’s almost like we’re saying, ‘You don’t matter. We’d rather just not be inconvenienced,’” she said.

Masks are a particular pain point.

“I was hugely disappointed when they took away the mask mandates for airplanes and other public transportation,” she said.

Given the minimal disruption to daily life from face coverings, and their major impact on curbing transmission, according to studies, she does not understand why public health leaders have stopped promoting their use.

Even one of the most recognizable seniors during the pandemic, Fauci, the National Institutes of Health scientist who is 81, no longer wears a face covering in many public appearances. In pictures from 2020, Fauci was always seen with a mask. Even when he threw the ceremonial first pitch that year on MLB Opening Day between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals, and was outdoors and 60 feet away from another human being, he was masked.

But last month, when the infectious-disease doctor accompanied TV host Stephen Colbert to a Walgreens in New York City to get a booster shot, neither wore a face covering.


Fauci, through his office, declined to comment on that decision. But in a White House briefing on Tuesday, he talked about face coverings as just one of “multiple interventions and multiple actions” people can take to protect themselves, saying each individual should evaluate their own risks, as well as those of the people around them.

Given the scripted nature of such photo opportunities, the decision to forgo masks horrified Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California at Irvine. “The message is ‘don’t bother masking,’ ” he said in an interview. “We have given up, and the fact we’ve given up means we don’t care about a certain amount of deaths.”

Noymer, who studies covid-19 mortality, argued that the notion that we can prevent almost all deaths given the pullback of mitigation policies is disingenuous.

“I don’t think they are being totally candid” about the number of deaths the country will face, he said of U.S. officials. “I think it is bleak, and I am trying to steel myself for the winter to come.”

Fenit Nirappil contributed to this report.
 
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a2374e38d388480bb7d4ed6da0ec2d2d.jpg
 
Their ages: 80s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 90s.

Alright, I’ll ask: when we’re they supposed to die, and from what instead?
 
I can see this working itself into a special tax cut for "boomers"....which of course would be a great thing for America and help make America great again! More money for "boomers" as a trade-off for an early expiration date......kind of a "win=win" for 'Merica, ain't it?
 
I can see this working itself into a special tax cut for "boomers"....which of course would be a great thing for America and help make America great again! More money for "boomers" as a trade-off for an early expiration date......kind of a "win=win" for 'Merica, ain't it?
I think it will be a tax cut for Americans who don’t have to take on more debt to keep the Ponzi checks flowing to the old plucks that rob people from a voting booth like cowards.
 
The older you get the more likely you are to die.
😳🤔
Wow. I’m in my early 70’s and I’m vaccinated. I try to stay healthy, eat well, take vitamins, exercise, sleep and don’t smoke. I had Covid at least once despite that.

But I also read that recent stats show that more Covid deaths are happening now among those who are vaccinated than those who are not.
America went through the wringer and it seems we’re not past it yet.
 
I think it will be a tax cut for Americans who don’t have to take on more debt to keep the Ponzi checks flowing to the old plucks that rob people from a voting booth like cowards.
See seminole....that is where you are so phuquing wrong, you have no credibility with most folks. Where you are "wrong" is that you actually think you are correct......and that is just wrong. But then, you do live in Florida, right? So please stay there.
 
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See seminole....that is where you are so phuquing wrong, you have no credibility with most folks. Where you are "wrong" is that you actually think you are correct......and that is just wrong.
You will avoid specifics precisely because you have no clue what you're talking about or how any of this actually works.
Just keep prattling and patting yourself on the back for robbing future generations because you suck at math and can thereby be played easily by politicians.
 
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People are finally starting to come around.

Shouldn‘t have closed businesses, and kept kids out of school, so that some 87 year old on oxygen, can take their social security money down to the casino for a couple more years.

To be fair early on it wasn't just old people dying as I think most of us know of more than one person below 60 that passed from the virus. Also, it was new, so no one really new what was going on and if they say they did they are lying and trying to act like a whole lot of under 60s died during the early months of COVID.

But I get how people like to rewrite history. Also the kids are fine, if there are some that are not they are likely mentally weak and were never going to amount to much in life anyway.
 
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We’ve seen the damage that isolated, mentally ill kids can do. The past two years, which too many kids spent isolated and online, have almost certainly exacerbated that problem.
 
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We’ve seen the damage that isolated, mentally ill kids can do. The past two years, which too many kids spent isolated and online, have almost certainly exacerbated that problem.

They are as mentally weak as the old people are physically weak, society is better off without them hanging around on our balance sheet. If we are going to be ok with eliminating liabilities then LETS BE OK WITH ELIMINATING LIABILITIES...amirite!
 
As I posted once before over a year ago about my ordeal on what I went through with Covid. I’ll shorten this up the best I can.

Back in early February of 2021 I was sent to Iowa City Hospital and I was close to Death as you can get for 6 days straight of my 15 days in ICU. TOTAL Hell I went through and when I was finally sent home it took me 6 months of hard work and a full year of hard work to get back 90 % of my lungs and health.

In March of 2021 I got my first two shots and 7 months later in September I got my first booster. It now has been 14 months and NO second booster yet and don’t know what to do because of all the different stories you read.

Please don’t say ask your Doctor. He’s a new Doctor as my life long Doctor retired. This new Doctor has told me two months ago to hold off and now he says go for it. I think he’s a Doctor that has two many different opinions on Covid.

I’m here to listen, fire away please with your thoughts. I have two daughters in High School yet so get what I’m saying.😕
 
Get your boosters. Stop smoking. Eat better. And start walking every day.
But, if you beat it before, you’ll be alright now.
 
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As I posted once before over a year ago about my ordeal on what I went through with Covid. I’ll shorten this up the best I can.

Back in early February of 2021 I was sent to Iowa City Hospital and I was close to Death as you can get for 6 days straight of my 15 days in ICU. TOTAL Hell I went through and when I was finally sent home it took me 6 months of hard work and a full year of hard work to get back 90 % of my lungs and health.

In March of 2021 I got my first two shots and 7 months later in September I got my first booster. It now has been 14 months and NO second booster yet and don’t know what to do because of all the different stories you read.

Please don’t say ask your Doctor. He’s a new Doctor as my life long Doctor retired. This new Doctor has told me two months ago to hold off and now he says go for it. I think he’s a Doctor that has two many different opinions on Covid.

I’m here to listen, fire away please with your thoughts. I have two daughters in High School yet so get what I’m saying.😕
That's shitty, but glad you're here.

You're probably an odd case for where advice on covid shots is concerned.

As far as I understand the boosters probably aren't going to harm anyone, but they might not be doing much good, either. I think they're most important for the elderly and those compromised immune systems.
 
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People are finally starting to come around.

Shouldn‘t have closed businesses, and kept kids out of school, so that some 87 year old on oxygen, can take their social security money down to the casino for a couple more years.

JFC, this guy. Finds new and interesting ways to justify his idiotic opinion on the subject of school shutdowns and wearing masks. Now he's cheering old people dying as some form of punishment for those that made decisions on each of those items
 
We’ve seen the damage that isolated, mentally ill kids can do. The past two years, which too many kids spent isolated and online, have almost certainly exacerbated that problem.
Just make sure these kids have access to firearms....so they can protect themselves from the slings and arrows the rest of us grew up with. Life is soooo unfair!
 
Getting people to GAF about the health of old people is hard. Without an advocate, an elderly person can be screwed for sure. I’ve never seen anyone shrug their shoulders when a child starts having unexplained seizures.
 
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Covid and age
The issue of age and the pandemic has been a source of tension throughout the pandemic.

When hospitals were hit with a crush of patients in the spring of 2020, some of the debates about allocating scarce resources centered on age. In documents drafted by some medical institutions, “stage of life,” a proxy for age, was sometimes recommended to be used as a tiebreaker in decisions about who should get a ventilator or a bed.

A number of experts, including Liao, expressed discomfort with such rankings. “I really disagree with that view,” he said. “You can imagine a 70-year-old who can do everything — can enjoy friendship, read books and go to movies.”

Jo Rowland, parish nurse at the Harvest Church in Billings whose job includes supporting congregation members and their families through covid illness and death, said society failed many of its elderly in another way, too: through safety protocols at the beginning of the pandemic that left them to die alone.

As more continue to fall victim to the virus, she said, we need to be more thoughtful about how to celebrate their lives and treat their deaths with dignity. “It’s a different type of grief losing an older person,” she said.

While some fault covid-19 policies for not doing enough to protect the elderly, others criticize age-based policies implemented elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, for example, a matrix of recommendations based on age left some seniors feeling they were being discriminated against. Even as stores and restaurants began to open in the summer of 2020, the National Health Service still advised people 70 and olderto stay home or “shield.” In Colombia, the government sought to protect older people by closing centers that offered activities for them through August 2020. The policies became controversial for restricting freedom of movement.

Elfriede Derrer-Merk, a geriatric nurse from the University of Liverpool, and others wrote in a journal article in August that many older people felt angry and frustrated that their individuality was ignored.

The “undifferentiated way in which especially the role of age as a risk factor was discussed, and the inclusion of all people above the age of 65 into one homogeneous risk group, often neglected … the diversity of older people and their characteristics and thus drew criticism for fueling ageism in society,” the authors wrote.

‘You don’t matter’​

Tara Swanigan’s father was in the first wave of deaths that occurred in 2020.

Charles Krebbs had celebrated his 75th birthday shortly before he was infected in July. He had retired from his job as an appraiser in Phoenix and was spending his time reading, gardening, picking up his grandson from school and accompanying him to his football games. He was strong and extraordinarily healthy, Swanigan recalled, but the virus nonetheless ravaged his lungs and he had to be put on a ventilator. He died that August.

Swanigan said she was heartened to hear about President Biden’s campaign to encourage older Americans to get booster shots. But she and other members of Marked by Covid, a nonprofit founded by two women who lost parents to the virus, advocate for more protections for people who are vulnerable, such as additional coronavirus testing. She continues to be shocked by how callous some people have been when she has talked about her father’s death. “Well, your dad was super old,” she recalled one man telling her on social media.

“For seniors and the immunocompromised, it’s almost like we’re saying, ‘You don’t matter. We’d rather just not be inconvenienced,’” she said.

Masks are a particular pain point.

“I was hugely disappointed when they took away the mask mandates for airplanes and other public transportation,” she said.

Given the minimal disruption to daily life from face coverings, and their major impact on curbing transmission, according to studies, she does not understand why public health leaders have stopped promoting their use.

Even one of the most recognizable seniors during the pandemic, Fauci, the National Institutes of Health scientist who is 81, no longer wears a face covering in many public appearances. In pictures from 2020, Fauci was always seen with a mask. Even when he threw the ceremonial first pitch that year on MLB Opening Day between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals, and was outdoors and 60 feet away from another human being, he was masked.

But last month, when the infectious-disease doctor accompanied TV host Stephen Colbert to a Walgreens in New York City to get a booster shot, neither wore a face covering.


Fauci, through his office, declined to comment on that decision. But in a White House briefing on Tuesday, he talked about face coverings as just one of “multiple interventions and multiple actions” people can take to protect themselves, saying each individual should evaluate their own risks, as well as those of the people around them.

Given the scripted nature of such photo opportunities, the decision to forgo masks horrified Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California at Irvine. “The message is ‘don’t bother masking,’ ” he said in an interview. “We have given up, and the fact we’ve given up means we don’t care about a certain amount of deaths.”

Noymer, who studies covid-19 mortality, argued that the notion that we can prevent almost all deaths given the pullback of mitigation policies is disingenuous.

“I don’t think they are being totally candid” about the number of deaths the country will face, he said of U.S. officials. “I think it is bleak, and I am trying to steel myself for the winter to come.”

Fenit Nirappil contributed to this report.
Is this really something new to you?
 
Getting people to GAF about the health of old people is hard. Without an advocate, an elderly person can be screwed for sure. I’ve never seen anyone shrug their shoulders when a child starts having unexplained seizures.

Absolutely. When my mom died from Covid the typical response was about how old she was. It didn’t matter that she was perfect healthy until she got Covid.
 
Get your boosters. Stop smoking. Eat better. And start walking every day.
But, if you beat it before, you’ll be alright now.
I’m 67 years old and still get told I look like I’m still in my early 50’s. With no underline health problems I got Covid pneumonia. I’ve always exercised, never smoke, never touched any drugs and I ate good. I do drink beer now and then 😊. Never been fat or over weight. I’m 6’1 “ 260 lbs and been told thousands of time I look like Stone Cold and did a couple of 5 year old birthday parties impersonating him in Tiskilwa Illinois and Morris, Illinois and pulled it off both times even the parents would look twice. I did the right things with my life and then all of a sudden I’m fighting for my life. I never had tubes put down my throat but for 5 or 6 days in a row Dr Rappaport “spelling” head Doctor of the Covid floor said to me keep fighting your borderline and you don’t want us to do that or I will only have 7-8 percent chance of making it. I was nauseous 5O percent of the time my whole stay. I lost 39 lbs in 15 days, lost a tremendous amount of blood one day and they had to put 4 or 5 bags of blood back into me. The day they went into my stomach I thought I never would wake up. Anxiety, stress, and depression was overwhelming. Not seeing your high school daughters and wife was heartbreaking when you thought all along I was going to die. Struggling every day to breathe and not sleeping hardly at all for 18 days straight was torcher, I can go on with some horrifying events but won’t. Right now I’m doing very well and the last BIX RUN I did a fast walk in 1 hour 45 minutes. Not great but but good enough. Quad City Times twice wanted to do a story of my ordeal and recovery but declined. Not much of anything ever terrified me but getting Covid again scares the shit out of me.
 
I’m 67 years old and still get told I look like I’m still in my early 50’s. With no underline health problems I got Covid pneumonia. I’ve always exercised, never smoke, never touched any drugs and I ate good. I do drink beer now and then 😊. Never been fat or over weight. I’m 6’1 “ 260 lbs and been told thousands of time I look like Stone Cold and did a couple of 5 year old birthday parties impersonating him in Tiskilwa Illinois and Morris, Illinois and pulled it off both times even the parents would look twice. I did the right things with my life and then all of a sudden I’m fighting for my life. I never had tubes put down my throat but for 5 or 6 days in a row Dr Rappaport “spelling” head Doctor of the Covid floor said to me keep fighting your borderline and you don’t want us to do that or I will only have 7-8 percent chance of making it. I was nauseous 5O percent of the time my whole stay. I lost 39 lbs in 15 days, lost a tremendous amount of blood one day and they had to put 4 or 5 bags of blood back into me. The day they went into my stomach I thought I never would wake up. Anxiety, stress, and depression was overwhelming. Not seeing your high school daughters and wife was heartbreaking when you thought all along I was going to die. Struggling every day to breathe and not sleeping hardly at all for 18 days straight was torcher, I can go on with some horrifying events but won’t. Right now I’m doing very well and the last BIX RUN I did a fast walk in 1 hour 45 minutes. Not great but but good enough. Quad City Times twice wanted to do a story of my ordeal and recovery but declined. Not much of anything ever terrified me but getting Covid again scares the shit out of me.
Wow. Thanks for sharing and so happy you are doing well today. Great response to idiotic takes of selfish, ignorant people.
 
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Getting people to GAF about the health of old people is hard. Without an advocate, an elderly person can be screwed for sure. I’ve never seen anyone shrug their shoulders when a child starts having unexplained seizures.

Could that be because an elderly person has already lived their life? Whereas a child has their entire life before them?
 
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They are as mentally weak as the old people are physically weak, society is better off without them hanging around on our balance sheet. If we are going to be ok with eliminating liabilities then LETS BE OK WITH ELIMINATING LIABILITIES...amirite!
But these people tend to act out and eliminate other INNOCENTS instead of eliminating themselves.
 
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