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.