Our View: The elderly need more than just protection from Covid-19

Seven or eight years ago in or around the time of the financial crisis, the Cyprus Mail photographer took a picture of a frail elderly woman digging through a wheelie bin in Nicosia. It was one of those photos that is not easy to forget.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, governments around the world have been pulling out all the stops to save the elderly from Covid, except those instances in the UK and New York of course when they transferred infected people from hospitals into care homes with the expected results.

Every week or every second week, the government sits with the scientific team to figure out what they can do to save the elderly from Covid, coming up with all sorts of measures, some of which don’t make a lot of sense but that’s another story.

At the same time that we’re reading about these latest measures and how the government is doing everything to save the elderly and vulnerable from Covid, they don’t seem to be in as much of a hurry to save these same groups from something like poverty, which is also a killer.

MPs heard on Tuesday that thousands of people are awaiting their benefits and that retirees can wait up to a year if not longer for their first pension payment.

As one MP said, the authorities, apart from acknowledging the magnitude of the problem have done nothing substantial to actually solve it.

Yes, the government has been acknowledging it for years, yet every few months, the issue comes up again. The government said in a statement after the House meeting that discussions would continue next month. No hurry then as poor people and the elderly freeze and can’t afford proper nutrition. Where are the weekly meetings at the palace to resolve this problem that also leads to deaths that won’t be publicised under the media spotlight?

It might be acceptable if the government was incompetent in everything they touch – some might argue that they are – but they have managed to co-opt the police, academia, the entire business world, and the state machinery to set up a pretty effective control grid when it comes to Covid, with no expense spared.

This shows that they can solve big complex problems when it suits. All it takes is a bit of time and effort if the goal really is to save as many lives as possible and not just from Covid.

With inflation and energy costs on the rise, we might expect to see more elderly people rummaging around in wheelie bins in the near future but at least they can be comforted in the knowledge that the government is doing everything it can to save them from coronavirus.