When finally permitted to visit, family found Pietro Bruccoleri “sweltering in a room [at a long-term care home north of Toronto] without any air conditioning” reports CBC. 

Not much later, he died. But not of COVID. Having been tested five times, with negative results, that pesky corona bug (with the sensationalist PR team) couldn’t be blamed. Instead the coroner listed Bruccoleri’s cause of death as inanition—a polite way of saying “exhaustion caused by lack of nourishment.”  

Dr. Vivian Stamatopoulos, associate teaching professor at Ontario Tech University, who specializes in family caregiving, told CTV News that this type of neglect would not have happened if family had been permitted to visit.

Stamatopoulos reports he’s heard dozen of stories of seniors in their third month of lockdown who are “drastically fading.” But, unlike Brucceleri, not from lack of food, but from lack of human contact. 

Nathan Stall, a geriatric physician at Mount Sinai Hospital, agrees: “[Long-term care homes] treat visitors as this luxury — a nice thing to have rather than a necessity.”

Indeed, a six-year study from the University of California, found that lonely seniors had a 62% increase in dying.

“We don’t want these petty outdoor visits which do nothing to work against the very dangerous harms of isolation,” said Stamatopoulos. “Any myth that families ship off their loved ones to these homes to die in isolation is incorrect. Their continued involvement in long-term care will help keep residents alive.”

In an interview, author Peter Hitchens says that the same applies for seniors living outside of care homes: “[Confining] the healthy old, is a catastrophe… All their social activities, which have kept them happy and contented stop… Huge amounts of people get to be suffering from clinical depression as a result of this.” 

“[Seniors] are dying of other conditions that are related to the lockdown but not to COVID-19 itself,” concludesStall. “We need to be capturing those metrics as well when we are thinking about that risk balance of is it worth keeping people in lockdown.”