Editorial | Hypothermia

Paulo Coutinho

Cold weather all over the planet is killing hundreds, especially the most delicate: the old, the sick, the homeless, and the lonely. In greater China and southeast Asia temperatures have been unusually low with sudden drops of the mercury.
In Macau, we too are having our fair share of the chill. Since temperatures reached a record low of 1.6 degrees Celsius on Sunday, four people have died of hypothermia and all over town people are complaining about the extremes of weather and about how difficult it is to keep their homes and offices warm.
“When one considers the poor quality of the local housing stock, particularly the appalling lack of insulation, it is surprising there are not more deaths. I call upon the Government to legislate higher minimum standards of insulation for all upcoming residential construction projects. Double-glazing and ceiling insulation is the bare minimum in such a climate as we have in Macau,” reads a comment posted on MDT’s website this week.
What our reader – who may as well be into engineering – is alerting us to is a structural problem. What our reader is proposing is a solution which demands changing legislation and ancient practices. I couldn’t agree more with him, and the government should really look into it. But we all know those changes are time consuming. Old habits die-­hard…
But there’re more shocking reasons to be “surprised there are not more deaths.”
According to the health authorities, the fatalities so far concerned old and/or bed-ridden patients. They all arrived at the hospital in precarious states of health – some from living alone and/or poor living conditions that the low temperatures dearly aggravated.
One of the victims, though, came from an aged care facility. And that makes me feel very uneasy. How come she froze?!
After consulting with medical and welfare professionals I realized that most of the care centers’ conditions – heavily subsidized – are “simply appalling.” I was told by insiders that very few institutions, namely Caritas and Obra das Mães, offer conditions beyond reproach for the elderly.
Moreover, most of the centers operate without resident medical and paramedic staff – against international health and welfare recommendations and best practice. Albeit as structural as the bad construction, the aged care problem would surely take incomparably less time and effort to amend.
In a city flooded by easy-money, inaction in this case is not only deplorable, it is criminal.
The last known victim of hypothermia was a 105-year-old lady who died yesterday at the central hospital. What an inglorious death for someone who lived to see almost all the momentous 20th century and may even have witnessed the previous lowest temperature recorded in Macau, in 1949.
Today, in her memory “je suis” old, lonely and sick.