Treatment for COVID-19 should not be denied or limited based on someone’s age, write 2 advocates for aging populations.
Some governments and health systems in the U.S. and abroad are developing guidelines that permit health care providers to use age as a reason to deny life-saving treatments, such as a ventilator, to older COVID-19 patients.
Nora Super, senior director of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, and James Appleby, CEO of The Gerontological Society of America, took issue with those guidelines in a recent blog for The Hill.
The two advocates for aging populations suggest that images depicting older people as frail, vulnerable, and burdensome—all too pervasive in our society—are making ageist triage guidelines more acceptable. They counter those images by mentioning the 50,000 older adults who answered the call when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asked retired doctors, nurses, and other health professionals to come back to work to fight COVID-19.
The authors also point out the “extraordinary heterogeneity” of the older adult population, and remind readers that all people with underlying health conditions—not just older people—are at high risk for severe health consequences from COVID-19.
“Among individuals, the relationship between age and mortality is highly variable,” they write. “Instead of denying or limiting treatment based on someone’s age, medical professionals need to consider multiple factors, such as a person’s overall health status, physiological reserve, and quality of life, in addition to life expectancy.”
New York’s protocol for rationing ventilators prohibits using advanced age as a triage criterion, and the National Institutes of Health prohibits the exclusion of older adults from clinical trials based solely on age. But governments like Italy have approved guidelines that give preference to younger patients over older patients if ventilators and other essential medical equipment must be rationed.
“To prepare for a time when these unthinkable decisions may be necessary, we must come together to demand that age not be used as the sole criterion for rationing health care,” Super and Appleby conclude. “We need to value people of all ages and remember that we are all in this together.”