COVID-19 mostly kills aged Americans: report

NEW YORK -- As the US COVID-19 deaths near 1 million, pandemic data show that more than 700,000 people 65 years and older in the country have died and men died at higher rates than women, reported The Boston Globe last week.

Three out of every four deaths were people 65 years and older; about 255,000 people 85 years and older died; 257,000 were 75 to 84 years old; and about 229,000 were 65 to 74 years old, according to the report.

Meanwhile, "white people made up most of the deaths overall, yet an unequal burden fell on Black, Hispanic and Native American people considering the younger average age of minority communities," said the report. "Racial gaps narrowed between surges then widened again with each new wave."

"A million things went wrong and most of them were preventable," elder care expert Charlene Harrington of the University of California, San Francisco, was quoted as saying.

Harrington, 80 years old, hoped that the lessons of the pandemic lead US health officials to adopt minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes, "then maybe I can retire."