‘These are real people’: With COVID deaths well above the norm, N.S. seniors share concerns | CBC News

As the COVID-19 pandemic lingered and the death toll increased, Nova Scotian Judy Aymar noticed how the province’s leaders no longer offered condolences when new deaths were announced.

“These are real people,” she said. “These are people who at one point in their lives, they built families, they built communities and they helped build the province. Why have they become a statistic and not a person?”

The province’s COVID-19 briefings once started with updates on how many people had died and would include condolences from the premier and chief medical officer of health.

But briefings have been discontinued. Updates on the state of the pandemic now come from a weekly update to the province’s COVID-19 dashboard, as well as monthly epidemiology reports.

The province says 753 people have died from COVID-19 — including 27 that were announced Thursday. The median age of death during the Omicron wave is 84.

Aymar, a 76-year-old retired social worker from Upper Tantallon, said Nova Scotians pride themselves on helping and supporting people during times of loss.

But she’s worried.

“Why have we, as Nova Scotians, accepted this silence?” said Aymar. “Why are we so silent that seniors are still dying and why aren’t we giving them dignity and acknowledgement and a thank you for all that they did?”

The Nova Scotia government did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Higher COVID death rates for seniors

According to the province’s January epidemiology report, Nova Scotians 70 and older have a death rate from COVID-19 that is 280 times higher than those under 50.

Aymar said she thinks the province should have a day of acknowledgement — not a holiday — to pay tribute to people who have died from COVID-19 and the contributions they made.

With COVID-19 restrictions lifted in Nova Scotia, seniors are particularly vulnerable, said Robert Huish, an associate professor at Dalhousie University whose expertise includes global health ethics.

“It’s almost full reliance on the vaccine and on people’s own willingness to mask up or choose to stay at home, so it’s moved from that collective duty to individual choice and responsibility,” he said.

Huish said fatigue sets in with public health campaigns, and it’s reached that point with COVID-19.

“It moves to, ‘Me, well, I got to take care of myself,’ and not to worry about other people, even though just a short time ago that’s all we were worried about,” he said.

Bill VanGorder, the senior Nova Scotia spokesperson for CARP — formerly the Canadian Association of Retired Persons— said his organization remains concerned.

“COVID-19 is not over,” he said.

VanGorder said the group recommends masking in public settings, but said “we are hearing from older people that somehow they feel like they are being stigmatized a bit by wearing masks.”

He’d like for the province to increase its messaging around COVID-19 and for the media to do more reporting on the pandemic.

VanGorder said when COVID-19 was in the headlines daily, it created “huge stress and anxiety” for a lot of older people.

“That wasn’t a good thing either, but now … we seem to have gone the other way and we’re not hearing as much about it as we used to, so there’s got to be a happy medium in there somewhere,” he said.

VanGorder said the province could get more information in the hands of seniors through the Seniors Advisory Council of Nova Scotia, which represents more than 100,000 older Nova Scotians.