ABSTRACT
In five short months of 2020, experts agree, responses to COVID-19 sharply worsened already-existing ageism. This chapter investigates the overlapping layers of the escalation. It starts by ascribing U.S. government incompetence and delay, with all their disastrous long-term consequences, partly to the earliest media focus on deaths in nursing homes, a senicide which led to the mistaken but durable impression that “only old people die.” After describing the pre-COVID “duty-to-die” discourses, the chapter explains how a harsh new stereotype was created. The media’s use of mortality data, hospital ventilator shortages and medical triage guidelines, public policies and Twitter discourses, and the omission of the voices of older adults changed the social image of “the old” from those formerly considered so hardy that they lived “too long” and cost too much, into those now deemed “doomed to die.” What studies and what reckonings are needed to undo the latest realities of ableist ageism?
