20
votes
New study shows that hurricanes lead to excess mortality long after the storm has passed
Link information
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- Title
- Hurricanes' hidden toll: Thousands of deaths years after they strike
- Published
- Oct 2 2024
- Word count
- 2200 words
Archive link https://archive.is/2VcbC
I live in a community of majority elderly people. There are homes in my area where the roof and siding haven't been yet repaired since Fiona in Sept 2022. They just can't afford it. All of the programs and assistance what nots are online, which is ridiculous. Aside from freezer full of food being gone and obvious things like wet basement, there is also a sense of "nobody cares if I make it through" that surely is bad for their health.
The same thing is true in my neighborhood, even absent a specific disaster. After a certain age homeowners can't keep up their homes but don't want to leave them, and so the house degrades until the owner dies or moves into some sort of care facility. Often then the house undergoes even more rapid degradation as it's going through probate or the owner is in no shape to sell it, and so it sits empty falling apart for another year or two before it's sold. And this is in an expensive part of an expensive area. We just don't have systems in place to help people that aren't obscured with thick layers of difficult bureaucracy. Whether that difficulty is intentional or not, it harms us all.
Aging without social support is its own disaster, also if not even more ignored.
My remaining parent has support from me and my sibling. There's SO much day to day and year to year....it's hard to imagine how elderly without family make it through.
Decades ago in HK there used to be type of profession called 書信佬/寫信佬 (letters dude), where literate (often multi-lingual) persons will handle taxes, government and overseas correnspsondess for the illiterate or monolingual folks in the neighbourhood.
Who is doing this for modern day elderly who may not understand a Google form, or a government digital application, or how to navigate grant queues and followup documents uploading?
Yeah. I'm childless by choice. I'm handling all of that stuff for my remaining parent and an elderly aunt, but I'm kind of dreading the point in my life where I'm going to need someone to handle hypernet tasks for me when I'm only used to doing things on the internet.
I think, practically, a lot of elderly without family don't make it through. They fall through the cracks one way or another, and the systems that might have helped them are so much slower and less responsive than the systems that try to extract money from them or otherwise hurt them. The government won't automatically assign a social worker to someone who's struggling, but their cell phone provider will absolutely cut them off in a month if they don't pay their bill.
We need that to be the other way around. Fast charity and patient consequences or everyone will, in their moments of weakness, become grist for the mill.