SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Three years into COVID-19, the death rate has skewed older now than at any other point in the pandemic.
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Recent United States Centers for Disease and Control data shows that nine out of ten COVID-19 deaths are in people ages 65 and older.
As new variants spread, Dr. Christina Mangurian, professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at UCSF, explains to KCBS Radio's "As Prescribed," COVID-19 is often just one of the issues that people face when they contract the virus.
In July of 2022, Mangurian's elderly father fell. He was taken to the hospital and sent home with a few stitches. A few days later, he tested positive for COVID-19 and her mother then tested positive as well. This opened up a massive can of worms for Mangurian and her parents to sort through in terms of getting a Paxlovid prescription, dealing with health care providers and understanding which medicines to take and not to take.
"At the end of the day, both of them got what they needed and deserved. They avoided hospitalizations and death, but I just couldn't help thinking, what happens to other people," Mangurian revealed. "I'm a very privileged person. I am English speaking, I have high health literacy, I'm very connected, I'm a physician myself, I have financial means, I have an internet that's easily accessible to me and these are all things that not everybody has, in addition to the color of my skin."
She said at the root of the issue are the systems in place that help those who have the illness. "It's really unacceptable that three years in, it's this hard for people to get the evidence-based care that they need," she said.
Moving forward, Mangurian recommended that, among other things, system administrators need to make it very easy for the primary care doctors to do their jobs.
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