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The sweltering temperatures have threatened the physical condition of the elderly and forced them to stay at home, while governments seek to take ordinary measures to protect them.
By Gaia Pianigiani
Report from Rome and its private maximum outer edge where temperatures reached 106 Fahrenheit.
As a light breeze blew through her living room and gray hair, Donata Grillo, a 75-year-old cancer survivor with a pacemaker and serious vision problems, sat by her balcony with a wet sponge in her lap.
That all he had to cool off this week when temperatures soared nearly 106 degrees Fahrenheit, or 41 degrees Celsius, in his home Rome. He has no air conditioning, enthusiasts or even a functional refrigerator in his two-bedroom apartment in a social housing complex on the outskirts of the city, next to a hospital and a road.
“It’s the feeling of stretching pasta all day,” Grillo said, twisting his hands to mimic pouring boiling water from a pot. A stop from a social worker was the only touch she had had for days, as the heat drove her inward.
“Don’t go anywhere, it’s too hot and it’s harmful to you,” Carlotta Antonelli, 28, who works with the Roman Catholic charity Caritas, told him during her excursion on Wednesday.
Successive heatwaves that have swept through Italy and the rest of southern Europe over the past week have forced those who can do so to seek safe shelter in air-conditioned homes and offices or waterfront retreats. But for many seniors, heat has become the new Covid. Sweltering temperatures have settled on the continent as another indiscriminate scourge, reinforcing the isolation of many other elderly people and threats to their health, and forcing governments and social centres to take ordinary measures to protect them.
“These days, they’re even more lonely,” Antonelli said, as he drove his car through two large, low-income suburban spaces where his charity helps dozens of residents. She visits Ms. Grillo once a week to help with daily responsibilities and assistance with medical appointments and legal matters.
As temperatures rise, the risk to Europe’s elderly is now widespread, and southern European countries joined others as far north as Belgium in setting up heating plans, many of which target elderly populations.
For Italy, excessive heat has forged a check on the country’s most urgent demographic trend, an aging population, to generate an acute crisis. About 24% of Italians are over 65, making it the oldest country in Europe, and more than four million of them live alone.
Last year, Italy was exposed to extreme temperatures for longer than most other European countries, experiencing three primary heatwaves. Nearly 30 percent of the other 61,000 people who died last summer due to excessive heat in Europe were Italians, and age plays a role. The number of Italians over 80 is now around 4. 5 million, almost double the number 20 years ago.
“Other older people with pre-existing situations are more vulnerable,” Andrea Ungar, president of the Italian Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics, said in a telephone interview. “But poverty and isolation also play a role. “
Europe’s summer in 2003 claimed more than 70,000 lives, according to some estimates, and Italy has grown older ever since. He struggled to adapt.
“It was hot even before 2003 in Italy, and we already had a giant population of elderly people, but not like today,” said Francesca De Donato, the epidemiologist whose branch collects information on climate and demographics across the country to post daily announcements of heat-related physical activity warnings, tailored across the city.
“The quota of other threatened people has been developing here,” De Donato said.
After 2003, Italy became one of the first countries in Europe to implement a national plan to mitigate the effects of excessive heat, based on World Health Organization guidelines.
The measures come with an alert formula to warn others to replace their behavior with their health. The government has recently suggested hospitals and GPs pay special attention to the most vulnerable, and have set up a toll-free number where others can seek advice or help for heat-related problems.
Days like Wednesday, when the heatwave peaked, are marked in red in the daily bulletin that Italy’s Ministry of Public Health needs to warn residents. wear soft clothing and sunscreen; drink plenty of water, eat new fruit, and avoid coffee and alcoholic beverages; and take special care when going out.
France, which was largely spared heatwaves this summer, has introduced a heat tax to fund systems to protect its most vulnerable population, adding normal phone recordings or in-person visits to heat waves. It also has a heat alert system, or “heatwave plan,” which successive governments have activated every summer since 2003.
The summer killed another 15,000 people in France, mostly elderly, who lived alone in urban apartments or nursing homes without air conditioning. Last summer, when successive heat waves hit the country, more than 2,800 French people died, 80% of whom were over 75, according to the French public health authority.
As temperatures rise northwards towards less accustomed countries, Belgium has implemented a three-stage heating plan, based on normal monitoring of temperature and ozone levels. In Brentelles, seniors and people who feel isolated or vulnerable can register by phone with municipal authorities, who will monitor them as soon as temperatures exceed 84 Fahrenheit. Social staff distribute liquids and monitor living conditions. 20 years
In Greece, the country’s archaeological sites will remain closed between noon and 5:30 p. m. m. until Sunday, when temperatures are expected to exceed 111 in Athens. The Ministry of Civil Protection said all government departments are “in a state of heightened preparedness to deal with the consequences of maximum temperatures. “
Here, as elsewhere, the government’s recommendation boils down to an undeniable imperative: stay home. This has imposed a special duty on governments and social personnel to ensure that isolation itself is not a danger.
In Ome, a team of regional fitness professionals checks by telephone the most vulnerable people, basically the elderly and sick, on days marked in orange or red for maximum severe heat.
While the hardships and isolation of the most vulnerable echo in many tactics to combat covid, the pandemic has also left smart practices, adding visits and treatments to others at home, fitness officials said. A 2022 law, passed by the government of former Prime Minister Mario Draghi, pushed for greater coordination between fitness and telemedicine. The Italian fitness government strives to have a virtual platform with up-to-date patient data that can be accessed by nurses, doctors, emergency departments and hospitals.
“Covid has replaced the mindset at someArray and that has helped a lot,” said Andrea Barbara, a public fitness officer who oversees close to a million citizens in Rome. “We’re doing more telemedicine, we’re moving more and more devices, not patients, but it takes time. “
Even those who do not want medical help, assistance remains and, for many vulnerable people, associations such as Caritas remain the maximum reliable weekly help. Ms. Antonelli, the social worker, brought two boxes of lightly carbonated water on two floors for Francesca Azzarita, a 91-year-old woman who lives alone with nothing to cool off but with a piece of cardboard to use as a fan.
“Carlotta, when you don’t come I feel lost,” Azzarita said with a strong Neapolitan accessory that she has not lost despite living in Rome for only about 50 years.
Doña Azzarita, a little woman when World War II broke out, never learned to read or write and worked all her life, first in the countryside around Naples and then as a housekeeper in Rome, where she moved after separating from her husband.
Now your morning starts with coffee and a painkiller for your aching legs. She cooks by herself, but on those days she doesn’t turn on the stove because it’s too hot and she rarely leaves her house, especially after falling to the sidewalk last week.
“The temperatures have changed since I’ve been a child,” she said. “I don’t want to watch TV to know that rain in general and sunshine in general, and now that’s no longer the case. “
Then he looked at Mrs. Antonelli, still panting from the stairs. “How would she help?” She.
Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens, Catherine Porter from Paris and Monica Pronczuk from Brussels.
Gaia Pianigiani is an Italian journalist for The New York Times. More information about Gaia Pianigiani
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