From his newsstand at the bottom of two hilly streets in Rome, Armando Alviti has been dispensing newspapers, magazines and good cheer to locals from before dawn till after dusk nearly every day for more than a half-century.“Ciao, Armando,” his customers greet him as part of their daily routine. “Ciao, amore (love)” he calls back. Alviti chuckled as he recalled how, when he was a young boy, newspaper deliverers would drop off the day’s stacks at his parents’ newsstand, sit him in the emptied baskets of their motorbikes and take him for a spin.Since he turned 18, Alviti has operated the newsstand seven days a week, with a wool tweed cap to protect him from the Italian capital’s winter dampness and a tabletop fan to cool him during its torrid summers. A mighty battle therefore ensued when the coronavirus reached Italy and his two grown sons insisted that Alviti, who is 71 and diabetic, stay home while they took turns juggling their own jobs to keep the newsstand open.“They were afraid I would die. I know they love me crazy,” Alviti said.The world’s second-oldest populationThroughout the pandemic, health authorities around the world have stressed the need to protect the people most at risk of complications from COVID-19, a group which infection and mortality data quickly revealed included older adults. With 23% of its population age 65 or older, Italy has the world’s second-oldest population, after Japan, with 28%.The average age of Italy’s COVID-19 dead has hovered around 80, many of them people with previous medical conditions like diabetes or heart disease. Some politicians advocated limiting how much time elders spent outside of their homes to avoid lockdowns of the general population that were costly to the economy.Among them was the governor of Italy’s northwestern coastal region of Liguria, where 28.5 percent of the population is age 65 or older. Gov. Giovanni Toti, who is 52, argued for such an age-specific strategy when a second surge of infections struck Italy in the fall.Older people are “for the most part in retirement, not indispensable to the productive effort” of Italy’s economy, Toti said.To the news vendor in Rome, those were fighting words. Alviti said Toti’s remarks “disgusted me. They made me very angry.”“Older persons are the life of this country. They’re the memory of this country,” he said. Self-employed older adults like him especially “can’t be kept under a bell jar,” he said.’Ageism is so accepted’The pandemic’s heavy toll on older people, particularly those in nursing homes, might have served to reinforce ageism, or prejudice against the segment of population generally referred to as “elderly.”The label “old” means “40, 50 years of life being lumped in one category,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in gerontology. She noted that these days, people in their 60s often are caring for parents in their 90s.“Ageism is so accepted … it’s not questioned,” Morrow-Howell said in a telephone interview. One form it takes is “compassionate ageism,” Morrow-Howell said, the idea that “we need to protect older adults. We need to treat them as children.”Alviti’s family won the first round, keeping him away from work until May. His sons implored him to stay home again when the coronavirus rebounded in the fall.He struck a compromise. One of his sons opens the newsstand at 6 a.m. and Alviti takes over two hours later, limiting his exposure to the public during the morning rush.Fausto Alviti said he’s afraid for his father, “but I also realize for him to stay home, it would have been worse, psychologically. He needs to be with people.”In the open-air food market in the Trullo neighborhood of Rome, produce vendor Domenico Zoccoli, 80, also scoffs at the belief that people past retirement age “don’t produce (and) must be protected.”Before dawn broke on a recent rainy day, Zoccoli had transformed his stall into a cheerful array of colors: boxes of red and green cabbages, radicchio, purple carrots, leafy beet tops, and cauliflower in shades of white, violet and orange, all harvested from his farm some 30 kilometers away.“Old people must do what they feel. If they can’t walk, then they don’t walk. If I feel like running, I run,” Zoccoli said. After packing up his stall at 1:30 p.m., he said he would work several hours more in his field, skipping lunch.Childcare providersMarco Trabucchi, a psychiatrist based in the northern Italian city of Brescia who specializes in the behavior of older adults, thinks the pandemic has gotten people to reconsider their attitudes for the better.“Little attention was given to the individuality of the old. They were like an indistinct category, all equal, with all the same problems, all suffering,” Trabucchi said.In Italy, with childcare centers chronically scarce, legions of older adults, some decades beyond retirement, effectively double as essential workers by caring for their grandchildren.According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics bureau, 35% of Italians older than 65 look after grandchildren several times a week.Felice Santini, 79, and his wife, Rita Cintio, 76, are such a couple. They take care of the two youngest of their four grandchildren multiple times per week.“If we didn’t care for them, their parents couldn’t work,” said Santini. “We’re helping them (a son and daughter-in-law) stay in the productive work force.”Santini still works himself, a half-day as a mechanic at an auto repair shop. Then, when he comes home, his hands keep busy in the kitchen: stuffing homemade cannelloni with sausage, making meat sauce and baking orange-flavored Bundt cakes for his grandkids.Cintio finds it painful not being able to hug and kiss her grandchildren. But she embraced 9-year-old Gaia Santini when the girl ran joyfully toward her after her grandmother navigated Rome’s narrow streets to pick her up at school. Cintio will take Gaia home for a break, before next accompanying her to an ice-skating lesson.Worried about COVID-19’s second surge, the couple’s son, Cristiano Santini, said he tried to limit the frequency with which his parents watch the children, but to little avail.“They’re afraid (of infection), but they are more afraid of not living much longer” due to their ages and missing previous time with their grandchildren, he said.
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Day: January 2, 2021
The United States topped 20 million coronavirus cases Friday as it began the New Year, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.The United States continued to surpass other countries in COVID-19 cases and accounts for nearly a quarter of the worldwide total, which now stands at more than 83.8 million. The country also leads the world in coronavirus deaths, totaling more than 347,000.The increasing numbers come as U.S. health officials struggle to vaccinate the population. The outgoing administration of President Donald Trump predicted in December that 20 million people would be inoculated by year’s end. However, health officials say only 2.8 million Americans have received their first dose of the vaccine.As of Wednesday, just 12.4 million doses had been distributed nationally, according to the country’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah on Friday sharply criticized the pace of the vaccinations and said more federal oversight of the process was necessary.”That comprehensive vaccination plans have not been developed at the federal level and sent to the states as models is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable,” Romney said in a statement.The 2012 Republican presidential nominee called for the government to assemble a large number of medical workers to administer the vaccine, including retired medical professionals, veterinarians, combat medics, medical students and first responders.He also recommended using sites that are largely empty because of the pandemic, such as schools, to administer the vaccine and called for a clear order in which Americans would be vaccinated.Grim record in CaliforniaThe United States has begun vaccinations of frontline health care workers and high-risk populations, such as those living in nursing homes, using two vaccines given emergency use authorization.The CDC has recommended the vaccines next be made available to frontline workers and people 75 and older. But some states have set up different criteria for the order in which they will vaccinate residents.In another development Friday, California reported a record 585 coronavirus deaths in a single day. The state also reported more than 47,189 new confirmed COVID-19 cases, bringing its total to nearly 2.3 million.Nearly 26,000 people have died from the virus in California, behind only the U.S. states of New York and Texas, according to data from Johns Hopkins.The surge in cases in California has led some hospitals to scramble to provide oxygen for the critically ill.The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Friday that the state would begin collaborating with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to improve the oxygen delivery systems at six Los Angeles-area hospitals.Also Friday, California’s San Diego County said it had confirmed a total of four cases of a coronavirus variant that was first identified in Britain and that appears to be more contagious. The virus variant has also been confirmed in the U.S. states of Colorado and Florida.In Oregon, officials said Friday a health care worker was hospitalized after having a severe allergic reaction to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Officials say an employee at Wallowa Memorial Hospital experienced anaphylaxis after receiving a first dose of the vaccine this week.Health officials say in rare cases, people can develop a severe allergic reaction to the COVID-19 vaccines; however, most people experience mild or moderate side effects.Health officials in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin expressed their shock at one worker’s actions at a hospital outside the state’s biggest city, Milwaukee. An unnamed pharmacist, officials said, admitted deliberately spoiling more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine by removing them from a pharmacy refrigerator. He was arrested Thursday.Hospital workers administered the spoiled doses before realizing the pharmacist had tampered with them. Hospital officials say the 57 people who received the ruined vaccines have been notified. They say they have consulted with Moderna, the vaccine manufacturer, and have been assured the people who received the corrupted vaccines will not be harmed by shots they received.Trump has said little about the issue of vaccinations in recent weeks, focusing mainly on unsupported claims that he was defrauded of a second term in the White House. But he did address the slow pace of vaccinations on Twitter, saying, “The Federal Government has distributed the vaccines to the states. Now it is up to the states to administer. Get moving!”The Federal Government has distributed the vaccines to the states. Now it is up to the states to administer. Get moving!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2020Numerous problems have emerged with the vaccination efforts in the U.S., including a shortage of funding for administering the shots and publicizing their availability in some communities. Each state is deciding on its own who should get vaccinated first, although health care workers and elderly people living in nursing homes have been at the head of the line in most places.
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President Donald Trump vetoed a bill Friday that would have gradually ended the use of large-mesh drift gillnets deployed exclusively in federal waters off the coast of California, saying such legislation would increase reliance on imported seafood and worsen a multibillion-dollar seafood trade deficit. FILE – Democratic Senator from California Dianne Feinstein, June 3, 2020.Trump also said in his veto message to the Senate that the legislation sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., “will not achieve its purported conservation benefits.”The fishing bill’s sponsors said large-mesh drift gillnets, which measure between 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) and 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) long and can extend 200 feet (60.9 meters) below the surface of the ocean, are left in the waters overnight to catch swordfish and thresher sharks.FILE – Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., Oct. 25, 2020.But they said at least 60 other marine species — including whales, dolphins and sea lions — can also become entangled in the nets, where they are injured or die. It is illegal to use these nets in U.S. territorial waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, and off the coasts of Washington state, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii. They remain legal in federal waters off California’s coast. In 2018, California passed a four-year phase-out of large-mesh drift gillnets in state waters to protect marine life. The bill Trump vetoed would have extended similar protections to federal waters off California’s shoreline within five years and authorized the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to help the commercial fishing industry switch to more sustainable types of gear. Trump said the West Coast drift gillnet fishery is subject to “robust legal and regulatory requirements” for environmental protection that equal or go beyond environmental protections applied to foreign fisheries. He said Americans will import more swordfish and other species from foreign sources without this fishery.
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