A number does not have a bodily form or show crimson red blood. So for the most part, it does not touch one’s feelings. Numbers and statistics only make sense within specific contexts. And the contexts themselves change depending on which perspective one’s approaching from and interpreting from.

 

Deaths from COVID-19 Are Mostly of the Aged; Whose Disaster Is This?

 

As of March 7th, 2023, there have been 30,581,499 COVID-19 cases total [in South Korea] and 34,049 deaths among them. If we take a look in terms of age, 31,898 deaths were among people 60 years and older, making up 93.7% of the death toll. If we take an even closer look, 20,302 were people 80 years and older, making up 59.63% of the death toll.

 

Just by looking at the numbers, South Korea did a decent enough job in taking preventative measures for the pandemic to receive the term ‘K-Prevention.’ Japan was always compared side by side to Korea, and it has experienced 32,958,774 cases and 70,788 deaths. The number of cases is similar to that of South Korea, but the death toll is almost double. Sweden, which shocked the world and was highly criticized for choosing group immunity tactics in the beginning, had 2,696,168 cases and 23,563 deaths. Compared to the UK, with 24,315,983 cases and 205,540 deaths or Germany, with 37,928,944 cases and 166,875 deaths, Sweden has been relatively better off.

 

At this point, there would be readers thinking, ‘What’s with all these complicated numbers?” and getting bored. When we focus on the numbers without providing a deep interpretation according to the context, people’s lives become an insignificant game of numbers.

 

▲ An overwhelming number of deaths due to COVID-19 have been that of the elderly. Moreover, the over-80 make up the majority of the number. We need to ask what the COVID-19 ‘disaster’ is and for whom. (Image source: pixabay)

But when the number is referring to the elderly, the situation is even worse. For any nation, most of the people who died from the virus were the elderly. Because they are merely some unfortunate ‘victims’ that didn’t survive the pandemic, they aren’t even the object of societal mourning. (Eight human rights organizations including the COVID-19 Human Rights Network sent a petition to the National Human Rights Commission of Korea requesting the government take action in regards to a public memorial and mourning of the victims of COVID-19, but there’s almost no response from the general public.)

 

Only a Mention of Senior Care Facilities, No Story of the Elderly

 

With the news of the outbreak in early 2020, the phrase ‘COVID-19 disaster [korona ilgu jaenan]’ has been repeated over and over again. But if we don't understand in what way it has been a disaster under which horizon, and especially if we don’t clearly go over what kind of disaster it has been to whom, the word ‘disaster’ is degraded into a banal modifier. Even for a sensitive individual who becomes depressed just from hearing the word ‘disaster,’ if there is no concrete direction to their emotions, both whatever they learn through the disastrous situation and their will to make things better ‘afterwards’ will be insignificant.

 

The other researcher-activists of Life Culture Research Center’s Okee Salon and I were also not too different. We tried to understand which direction the disaster was pointing towards as much as we could, and since the strongest warning was directed to people with underlying diseases and the elderly, we couldn’t let our guards down. But until we met the specific realities of the (preventative) cohort quarantine restrictions, our efforts, which had just relied on the media, had been abstract.

 

We slowly realized that there’s just superficial coverage of senior care facilities, the stories of the elderly who are living there are usually omitted, and even when those stories are mentioned, they are so vague that we could not assert that we ‘know’ what was going on. By interviewing these senior care facilities’ directors, secretary generals, and union officers, we learned how important it is to approach senior care facilities as spaces of ‘people’ and ‘life,’ and how much of that is omitted.

 

To earn embodied knowledge of what a society consists of, you must go ‘into the field.’ While researching the conditions of the senior care facilities that implemented (preventative) cohort quarantines during the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned that our team was only at the very beginning of a long exploration and research project. A senior care facility is a place where people live, a place where care labor/activity takes place to enable that living, and a place where caretakers that reside externally are connected in diverse ways. Additionally, it is also a place where the reality and the illusions of our senior welfare system—which the state does not support as well as it claims—are intertwined.

 

‘A complete ban on visits and other protective measures, such as the (preventative) cohort quarantine, are mandatory for places where the elderly with underlying conditions live.’ It doesn’t naturally occur to us that the period after this seemingly simple sentence could feel forcible and even violent. It has to be intentionally realized; and to come to that realization, a deep and wide sense of the ‘process of knowing’ is necessary. This truth has been concealed and continues to stay hidden.

 

The ‘Dangerous’ Situation of Swedish Senior Care Facilities that Allowed Visits, and Its Actual Consequences

 

Let’s take a look at the case of Sweden as I mentioned above. In Sweden, a senior care facility is a place where the elderly choose to spend the remainder of their life. It’s their home. It essentially does not make sense to shut down someone’s home. Unlike the suspicions caused by rumors, the number of deaths in Swedish senior care facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic was not too much higher than that before the pandemic. The elderly living in these facilities went wherever they wished and didn’t stop receiving visitors. For those of us who could not imagine a different reality other than forced quarantine in the name of protection, the ‘dangerous and free’ lifestyle that the Swedish elderly enjoyed brings us a new perspective. (See COVID-19 Response, In the Field: How Did Swedish Elderly Population Live Through the Pandemic?, Sisa IN, October 20, 2022)

 

American poet and journalist Walt Whitman wrote about his three years of experience as a volunteer nurse for the Union Army in 1862 during the American Civil War (1861-1865). He reported that indifference weighed heavily in the wards and young patients were indefinitely neglected in their anonymity. He explained that his writing was meant to follow his calling to grant an identity to each of these people.

 

“My custom is to go through a ward, or a collection of wards, endeavoring to give some trifle to each, without missing any. Even a sweet biscuit, a sheet of paper, or a passing word of friendliness, or but a look or nod, if no more. [...] I find out the general mood of the ward at the time; sometimes see that there is a heavy weight of listlessness prevailing, and the whole ward wants cheering up. I perhaps read to the men, to break the spell [...] Every one of these cots has its history – every case is a tragic poem, an epic, a romance, a pensive and absorbing book, if only it were written.” (Quoted in Madeleine Bunting’s, Labours of Love, translated into Korean by Seungjin Kim, Banbi, 2020, 186-187)

 

When I read Whitman’s words, I think of the elderly living (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic) in senior care facilities; the sick bodies that are merely existing while losing their names and their own stories amidst the heavy indifference.

 

According to our interviews, the elderly [in these facilities] in some ways had some fun as well since all the employees, including the caretakers, stayed there with them. But whenever family visits or residents’ outings are completely prohibited, it inevitably results in isolation and disconnection. It is not difficult to imagine a situation where indifference and anonymity increases.

 

A Structure for Sympathizing and Connecting to a Loneliness That’s Not Mine Yet?

 

But it is not easy for the general public with no direct connection to these senior care facilities to sympathize with the sense of isolation and loneliness of the elderly who can only reside in the facilities. When there is no sense of this being ‘my business,’ the situation that this elderly population is in is just a ‘vague story from a faraway place.’ They are segregated from the community called society and fall deep into complete anonymity and ambiguity.

 

The loss of dynamism from their lives that the elderly in senior care facilities experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic could be, in some sense, understood as a basic trait of these spaces. The pandemic worsened the phenomenon, but [our society] has a basic sociological/psychological structure that generalizes the elderly who live in the facilities. To put it bluntly, these senior care facilities are almost always in a semi-emergency state. They are places that desperately need ‘a sweet biscuit, a passing word of friendliness, or but a look or nod.’

 

▲ Why are there so few ‘fellow citizens’ that specifically sense the elderly’s agony and pain from isolation and disconnection endured at senior care facilities?

A disaster can also be a motivator that provides new energy to and brings together the people who are going through it and others who hope to stay next to them in solidarity. It is not rare [for a disaster] to be a precious opportunity to awaken the often dulled sense of solidarity [among the general public.] But why didn’t we see many who were willing to give support by being next to the ‘most vulnerable population’ that the COVID-19 pandemic hit the hardest, especially the elderly population who lives in these senior care facilities? Why are there so few ‘fellow citizens’ that specifically sense the elderly’s agony and pain from isolation and disconnection endured at these facilities?

 

As part of the journey to find the answers to these questions, we spent a year interviewing the caretakers who specialize in caring for the elderly in senior care facilities and via in-home care services. After that, we interviewed the ‘guardians’ who had family living in these facilities. Whether it is done in the person’s home or in a facility, caring for the elderly who are unable to live on their own has the characteristics of both expert and non-expert caretaking labor. At the same time, it brings us to question of what kind of labor this is, with what kind of traits.

 

The question of what kind of caretaking/labor, separate from that provided by professional caretakers, is entailed in a guardian’s role  has also been overlooked until now. And when a family member or a friend is the one providing care, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are a legally recognized ‘guardian.’ In order to make it possible for a person to go on living, to some extent, it is necessary to closely observe which different types of care are needed from which caregivers.

 

For the following year, I’ll be writing to introduce the three-year journey of Okee Salon’s researcher-activists trying to ‘understand better’ amid all these questions and ponderings. Most of all, I will restructure the existing line between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of senior care facilities into a question and create a forum to discuss the possibility of good’ senior caretaking; a ‘just’ caretaking enabled by sufficient sharing [of resources]; the expert skills and knowledge of senior caretakers; the phenomenon of being a guardian/providing care as a guardian; and more. I hope that this process will let us feel and sense the stories and the time lived by the elderly without them being reduced to mere numbers. It will be a process of securing the specificity of the big picture of transition into a caretaking society.

 

[About the Writer] Young Ok Kim is a researcher-activist at Our Life Culture Research Center’s Okee Salon. She wrote With White Hair Flowing, Feminism After 60 Years of Age (2021), Old Age is Beautiful (2017), and To the Bodies of Three O’Clock in the Morning (co-authored, 2020).

 

[Translated by Seung-a Han] Published: March 8, 2023 *Original article: http://ildaro.com/9579

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

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