Imagine the scene: a man in a chair, emaciated almost beyond recognition, his head listing at the end of a neck too weak to support it; his body bears the signs of septic shock -- he has been wallowing in his own filth -- his skin discolored, his breathing labored; this fellow, formerly “hale and healthy” at the age of seventy-five, has choked on his food and developed aspiration pneumonia. This is not a concentration camp memoir, nor is it the opening scene from some gritty work of dystopian fiction. It comes from the first lines of a major investigative report by the Associated Press late last year, into the isolation and neglect to which we have subjected our elderly, especially those we have consigned to nursing homes. During the pandemic year, elderly persons in nursing homes perished by the thousands in excess of statistical normality. Some of them died of Covid-19. The AP, however, also found that a massive number of residents who didn’t have Covid nevertheless died of “failure to thrive.” Their report estimated that for every two Covd-19 victims in long-term care, another resident died prematurely. Residents with dementia fared very badly. People with dementia rarely do well when they do not have regular interaction with family, friends, staff, and fellow residents. They tend rapidly to decline when they are in isolation -- programmed or merely effective -- and they have filled the rolls of “excess deaths” during the pandemic. “There’s something going on,” said Dr. Robert Anderson when he saw the numbers, “and it needs to be sorted out.” Dr. Anderson is chief of mortality statistics at the US Centers for Disease Control, and he’s right. It doesn’t take anything close to genius-level analytical ability or a supercomputer to crunch the numbers and see that isolation during the pandemic was a major contributing factor to these horrific outcomes. We’ve been willing to put up with this because we thought that isolation was saving lives -- of the elderly and others at risk in the general population -- but now, vaccines are turning the tide. In Israel, for instance -- which has some of the highest vaccination rates in the world -- they recently had a day with zero Covid deaths, the first time that happened in ten months. In the US, over 80 percent of those over 65 years-old have received at least one vaccine shot. This is a stunning achievement in a country with our very large population. With more and more of their family members also getting vaccinated as well, you would think that we would start seeing seniors being moved out of isolation and back into active relationships with their vaccinated family members. That it is not what is happening. The Hastings Center -- perhaps the most important bioethics center in the United States -- explains that isolating these vulnerable populations requires a “robust ethical justification” and makes clear that this kind of isolation is still infuriatingly common: