Elder Abuse
Illustrations by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. Source photographs © Getty Images, iStock, Jean Mohr/World Health Organization, and Alamy
At the beginning of this year, Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center, a nursing home in Richmond, Virginia, housed 160 elderly residents, roughly half of whom were African-American. Most of them were there courtesy of Medicaid, the government program that finances health care for those with little or no money. By mid-May, 80 percent of Canterbury’s residents had been infected with the novel coronavirus. A third of them were dead.
Sharon Mitchell, a sixty-two-year-old former dental receptionist, was one of the casualties. She had been at Canterbury for two years, following a stroke brought on by the shock of losing her…