Deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia have soared 20% above normal this summer. Increased isolation and stress brought about during the Covid19 lockdown is being blamed.
“There’s something wrong, there’s something going on and it needs to be sorted out,” Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the CDC, said in a recent interview. “This is highly unusual.”
The surge marks the second time this year deaths from other causes have spiked in coordination with Covid. The first occurred early in the pandemic and was attributed to dementia, heart disease and pneumonia.
This second wave is attributed almost entirely to dementia. There have been 61,000 deaths from dementia since June – 11,000 more than usual in that time frame.
Frontline health care workers attribute the deaths to disrupted daily routines brought about by the lockdowns. Those daily routines kept residents in nursing homes with dementia dressed, fed, socially engaged and out of harm’s way.
Read more about this important development at Politico.
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