Older Italians defy biases crisis exposed

Regional governor’s remarks raise ire

ROME — Throughout 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 that 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 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% 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.

Armando Alviti, a news vendor in Rome, 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.

The pandemic’s heavy toll on older people 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.

“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, 71, who has operated his newsstand since he was 18, has battled with his two grown sons who have insisted that their father, a 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.

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.”

Marco 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 child care centers chronically scarce, legions of older adults 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, take care of the two youngest of their four grandchildren multiple times per week.

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.