As millions “age in place,” millions more must figure out how to provide their loved ones with increasingly complex care.

When Laura sent me an email in early August, the first thing she did was apologize. “Please excuse how inelegant and disjointed this will be,” she wrote. “It matches my brain after being a caregiver since 2013.”

Canada’s public health care system is widely celebrated, and with good reason. Following years of struggle, the problems posed by private health care provision were overcome with the establishment of a universal and public single-payer medicare system in the 1960s. Bernie Sanders and others involved in the inspiring Medicare For All campaign in the United States often point to Canada’s single-payer system as a model to be followed.

Cooper Holmes' life is a whirlwind of family responsibilities.

At 36, he takes care of his three-year-old daughter while his wife works as a full-time teacher, and helps support his 76-year-old mother, who has health issues.

Holmes, who lives in Delta, Colorado, spends four hours a day running his mother's 50-sheep farm with his daughter in tow. And since the pandemic began, he has handled her grocery shopping and other errands. He also contributes about $200 to help her pay the monthly bills.

At the start of the summer, Paula Tinkler was ready to take her career in a new direction. This may not be unusual – but the speed with which she was able to make the transition was. Within a week, she was shadowing a carer in Workington, England. Within a month, she was working as a carer herself.

Not only was her training rapid – it also took place completely in her own home. “I began the recruitment process by e-mail and completed my assessment online, which was followed by an interview and training process that was entirely digital,” she says.

Taxation of retirement income is an important issue. People with significant 401(k) holdings are going to owe the government a meaningful portion of their pile in taxes.

In the process of calculating how large that tax burden might be, it was necessary to review the taxation of Social Security benefits.

On Wednesday, Facebook took down a video posted on President Trump’s official page in which he falsely claimed that children were “almost immune” to the coronavirus. The video, which violated Facebook’s policies specifically on health misinformation around the coronavirus, had been viewed nearly half a million times before it was removed. Twitter, likewise, blocked a tweet with the same video that was posted by the Trump campaign’s account.

IN MID-MARCH, AS San Francisco mayor London Breed issued a citywide stay-at-home order, Peggy Cmiel started getting prepared. Cmiel is the director of clinical operations at the San Francisco Center for Jewish Living, or SFCJL, a 9-acre senior housing complex in the Excelsior neighborhood that includes long-term care facilities, short-term rehab housing, and a memory care wing. The campus houses over 300 elderly residents, members of one of the populations most vulnerable to the deadly and highly infectious coronavirus that has spread across the globe.

Days before she tested positive for COVID-19 in early April, Tanya Beckford was already worried about dying because of the conditions in the Connecticut nursing home where she has worked for 23 years. She wasn’t feeling well and says she and her co-workers, facing a shortage of masks, gloves and gowns, had started wearing plastic trash bags over their uniforms for protection as they cared for infected residents.

The heartbreaking statistic relayed in my headline is not, as some have suggested, an attempt to diminish the tragedy of the tens of thousands of Americans who have died as a result of lethal Coronavirus outbreaks at nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Every human life has value and dignity, and losing so many aging Americans to this virulent disease is gut-wrenching. The point is not that older lives lost do not matter.

Someday, most of us will return to life before COVID-19. Nursing homes will not.

The deaths of more than 16,000 of their residents from COVID-19 has profoundly disrupted senior living facilities—especially nursing homes— and will drive historic change in the industry. Robert Kramer, president of the consulting firm Nexus Insights and a long-time observer of nursing home finances, told me, “There never will come a time when we will return to the old normal.”