Are our elderly to become the ‘Expendable’ in the COVID-19 age?

SIR,

In the war against the Coronavirus “the Elderly” are confined to the barracks leaving the field open to the Millennials.

A concern conspicuously absent is that some of the elderly in their seventies and eighties would reflect upon having previously been subject to a means test which had resulted in their being required to return their Medical Cards to the State, leaving them more vulnerable than at any other time in their lives.

They face into great anxiety in the knowledge that it would be impossible for them to meet expensive hospital and prescription costs.

Confined to the barracks as they are, the elderly will read with some alarm that, with an increasing call by the day on the health care services in Ireland, the State may need to consider the prioritising of these services.

Some patients might be accorded preferential treatment over other patients – whose demise might have been considered for the general good as far as the English economist Thomas Malthus might have been concerned in relation to population control.

In our time in the days of the Coronavirus is becoming something akin to the storyline of the 1973 Charlton Heston dystopian movie Soylent Green.

Confined to the barracks there would be those amongst the ranks of the elderly convinced that the day would come when they would be transported from the barracks to the ‘departure lounge’, facing into the exit.

The vulnerable elderly acquiring the penultimate classification:

The Expendable.

Please note that the over 70s author of this correspondence maintains strict adherence to the guidelines for the over 70s set out by the Health Services Executive.

Sincerely, John Kelly Mullingar, Co Westmeath