My turn for an AstraZeneca dose has come up, so I need to decide whether to drop out of Novavax tests
I had two excellent pieces of news this week. They left me feeling utterly wretched.
First, my turn came up for the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid. I was told I could have my first jab on Thursday.
Continue reading...Experts agree that the impact of the jab will vary regionally and among different groups
Analysts are involved in an urgent effort to gauge the impact of Britain’s mass Covid-19 vaccine campaign and to pinpoint dates when lockdown measures can be eased.
More than 3 million people – most of them elderly or vulnerable individuals or health workers – have already been given jabs. Now researchers are trying to establish when the first fruits of the mass vaccination programme may be seen as the government heads towards its target of immunising more than 13 million people by 15 February.
Continue reading...Exclusive: ‘We’re sitting ducks,’ says Edendale Lodge boss, as fears rise of variant breaching homes’ defences
A care home in East Sussex has been devastated by Covid, losing half of all its residents to the disease over Christmas, fuelling fears the new, more transmissible virus variant sweeping the south-east of England is beginning to breach homes’ defences.
Thirteen of 27 residents at Edendale Lodge care home in Crowhurst had died with confirmed or suspected Covid since 13 December, said the home operator’s managing director, Adam Hutchison, who also runs care homes in Kent.
Continue reading...Margaret Keenan was given vaccine on Tuesday morning in Coventry following its approval last week
Margaret Keenan, 90, became the first patient in the world to receive the Pfizer Covid-19 jab following its clinical approval as the NHS launched its biggest ever vaccine campaign on Tuesday.
Keenan received the jab at about 6.45am in Coventry, marking the start of a historic mass vaccination programme.
Continue reading...Since the Covid-19 outbreak, French care home resident Colette Dupas's contact with her daughters has been limited to talking via video call or through a window. Now, thanks to an inflatable tunnel and two plastic sleeves, the 97-year-old has been able to feel their touch. Made from hermetically sealed plastic film, the 'hug bubble' allows care home residents – isolated from the outside world to avoid catching the virus – to hold hands and embrace their visiting relatives through a sleeve. Once visitors leave, care home employees disinfect the plastic sheet, ready for the next encounter
Continue reading...They grew up in a ‘nowhere’ suburb in the 70s, smoking skunk, going for rides and dating girls. The photographer reveals why he decided to capture the ravages of time on his old childhood gang
Rick Schatzberg had a dark epiphany a few years back, when two of his friends died in quick succession, one from a heart attack, the other from an overdose. “When two people you know and love die within six weeks of each other,” says the photographer quietly, “you realise that death is not just something that happens to other people, to the unlucky people. It’s something that is suddenly very present.”
Schatzberg’s response was to undertake a project about encroaching mortality – his friends’ and by extension his own. The result, several years in the making, is The Boys, a photobook that is both nostalgic and brutally realistic: a visual evocation of youth in all its instinctive carefreeness; and old age in all its debilitating inevitability. Composed of casual colour snapshots of his male friends in the 1970s, and large-format contemporary portraits of their ageing bodies, it lays bare what the novelist Rick Moody, in his accompanying essay, calls “the sobering action of time”.
Continue reading...I am 75 and taking part in the Novavax trial but the success of the Oxford jab has given me a dilemma
My third appointment with researchers this week, as a participant in Covid-19 vaccine trials, was overshadowed by the news that the Oxford vaccine will probably be available to older folk like me in the early part of next year – maybe as early as January or February.
The vaccine I am trialling – the Novavax one – will have test results in January, and probably be available in the summer. So what happens to us guinea pigs when the Oxford vaccine is available, I wanted to know. As a reasonably healthy 75-year-old, I’m likely to be – in the doctor’s words – “at the back of the front of the queue” for it. I have signed up to be in the Novavax study for a year. But if I have the Oxford vaccine, do I cease to be any use?
Continue reading...‘It’s much easier to get funding for children’ says one charity, as 11-country survey finds systematic failings ‘tantamount to neglect’
Older people around the world are being “systematically failed” by aid agencies, leaving them unable find enough food or access medicine, research has found.
Interviews with almost 9,000 older people affected by natural disasters, conflict or socio-economic crises in 11 countries, including Yemen, South Sudan and Venezuela, found a “one size fits all” aid approach which leaves out older people, according to a joint report published on Thursday by HelpAge International and Age International.
Continue reading...From Bond girl to badass grandmas, Tsai Chin has had an extraordinary career. She talks about her battles with racism, predatory producers – and farting leopards
‘I have lived on my own since 1963,” says Tsai Chin down the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “It doesn’t mean I haven’t had a sex life.” But it does mean that the 88-year-old actor brings something special to her latest role as a beguilingly irascible, chain-smoking widow who faces down triad thugs over stolen money in the comedy Lucky Grandma. Apart from the smoking, Grandma Wong is my new role model.
“I’m tough but my heart is very soft,” she says. And that is the key to Grandma Wong, a woman who projects to the world the opposite of what she is inside. In the film, she has a shrine to her late husband in her meagre Chinatown apartment in New York. She’s alone and impoverished but isn’t quite ready to give up her independence and move in with her sweet if bougie son in his brownstone.
Continue reading...Some of my friends think I’m mad but we need to know people my age can go out safely again
There’s a 50% chance that this week I was injected with a vaccine designed to protect me from Covid-19. If not, I got the saltwater placebo instead. I won’t know until the study ends in 13 months, which is a shame. It would be nice to walk the streets without looking balefully around me at young people not wearing masks and thinking: I’m 75, this virus kills people my age.
It killed my chum Mike Pentelow, who was having a lot of fun in his retirement, writing books with titles such as A Pub Crawl Through History, and Mike was a year younger than me. Perhaps he’s the reason I volunteered to be a guinea pig for one of the companies working on a vaccine.
Continue reading...Scientists say idea of ‘focused protection’ for vulnerable people is very hard to achieve and likely to lead to even higher death toll
At first glance it sounds like a no-brainer. Coronavirus is most dangerous to older and unhealthier people, so why not protect them and let the rest of society return to life as normal? It would boost the economy and free the young and fit from the mental and financial burdens of Covid restrictions. In time, as the virus tears through them, they will acquire herd immunity that ultimately helps us all.
The strategy proposed in the Great Barrington declaration – a letter signed by an international group of scientists – is the latest salvo in an ongoing battle of ideas for how to tackle the pandemic. It calls on governments around the world to abandon strategies that suppress the virus until we can better cope – through working test-and-trace programmes, new treatments, vaccines and more – for the radically different approach.
Continue reading...Critics describe proposal to isolate vulnerable, disabled and older people as ‘grotesque’
An international group of scientists has called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable.
The proposal, drawn up by three researchers but signed by many more, argues for letting the virus spread in low-risk groups in the hope of achieving “herd immunity”, where enough of the population is resistant to the virus to quell the pandemic.
Continue reading...A frailty index is rationing treatment for older and disabled people who catch coronavirus. We are not sacrificial lambs
Lockdown was easy for me, it has become my daily state more frequently throughout my life. I have a debilitating connective tissue disorder that keeps me indoors most days. It was a relief I no longer had to go out and pretend to be normal when wracked with ill-health and hidden pain. Like thousands of others with rare conditions, I’m already in a minority within a minority, marginalised by our NHS, battling increasing disability day by day. So, while many fear a second lockdown over the winter months, I haven’t gone out more often since the first one was lifted because I risk a double jeopardy – catching Covid, then being a low priority for medical care.
Back in March, without consultation and days before the first lockdown, the Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS), a worldwide tool used to swiftly identify frailty in older patients to improve acute care, was adapted by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). It asked NHS staff in England to score the frailty of Covid patients. Rather than aiming to improve care, it seems the CFS – a fitness-to-frailty sheet using scores from one to nine – was used to work out which patients should be denied acute care. Nice’s new guidelines advised NHS trusts to “sensitively discuss a possible ‘do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ decision with all adults with capacity and an assessment suggestive of increased frailty”.
Continue reading...Strategy of repeated ‘circuit breakers’ would reduce total number of cases, according to leading scientific adviser
One of the government’s scientific advisers has said repeated “mini lockdowns” could be effective as a tool to bring Covid-19 cases under control.
The suggestion from Professor John Edmunds, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), comes amid growing evidence the virus’s prevalence is growing among older, more vulnerable people.
Continue reading...Data also shows up to 75% of all deaths in care facilities globally were of people with dementia
People with dementia accounted for a quarter of all Covid-related deaths in England and Wales, and three-quarters of all deaths in care facilities globally, data shows.
The London School of Economics and University College London are looking at the mortality rate of those with dementia in a regularly updated report. According to their research, up to 75% of Covid-19 deaths globally in care facilities are those with dementia as an underlying condition.
Continue reading...Financial effect of pandemic may seriously erode ability to look after the most vulnerable
There is a graph circulating in the care home industry that should send chills down the spine of the health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock. It predicts, under a worst-case scenario, a plunge in the demand for care homes by the end of 2021 that would leave 180,000 beds empty.
The forecast by consultants Knight Frank is not good news based on a healthier aged population, but rather is based on fresh waves of coronavirus killing thousands more people in the community and in care homes, creating a flight from the sector.
Continue reading...Fredie Blom said earlier this year he had ‘lived this long because of God’s grace’
A 116-year-old South African man believed to be among the world’s oldest people has died, his family said.
Born on 8 May 1904, Fredie Blom told Agence-France Presse earlier this year he had “lived this long because of God’s grace”. South African media have described Blom as “unofficially” the world’s oldest man.
Continue reading...Temperatures could reach up to 38C during string of very hot days, say forecasters
The UK could see record-breaking temperatures on Friday, with forecasters saying it could be the hottest day of the year. People are being warned to look out for older people, young children and those with underlying health conditions, as the UK prepares for the heatwave to continue through the weekend.
The Met Office issued the amber heat health warning, the second-highest available, on Thursday as it warned people to look out for each other and drink plenty of fluids, while avoiding excessive quantities of alcohol, to deal with temperatures that could rise as high as 38C (100F) in some places.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Matt Hancock is advocate of plan to raise tax to cover cost of care in later life
Everyone over 40 would start contributing towards the cost of care in later life under radical plans being studied by ministers to finally end the crisis in social care, the Guardian can reveal.
Under the plan over-40s would have to pay more in tax or national insurance, or be compelled to insure themselves against hefty bills for care when they are older. The money raised would then be used to pay for the help that frail elderly people need with washing, dressing and other activities if still at home, or to cover their stay in a care home.
Continue reading...Exclusive: figures show Britain second only to Spain among major European countries
Care home residents were more likely to die of Covid-19 in the UK than in any of the major European countries apart from Spain, analysis of global data has revealed.
The proportion of residents dying in UK homes was a third higher than in Ireland and Italy, about double that in France and Sweden, and 13 times higher than Germany. The analysis of official statistics was carried out by academics at the London School of Economics as part of the International Long Term Care Policy Network.
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