Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT) conversed with Brookdale’s executive director, Ruth Finkelstein, about the social and mental health effects of the coronavirus pandemic on older people. The podcast, released on Nov. 4, is part of the PICT Voices series, which began in March 2020 to try to make sense of what is happening in the time of COVID-19. (Also in the PICT Voices series is “Pandemic: A Medical Narrative,” a conversation with Dr. Philip Alcabes, Hunter College professor and director of the Public Health Bachelor of Science program.)
The early focus on the virus’s effect on nursing home populations fostered a sense that age was the main risk, and that if older adults could be sectioned off “for their own protection,” then the rest of the population could go about their lives as usual, said Dr. Finkelstein. But older adults vary greatly in their well-being and resources, and the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 is strongly associated with underlying health conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, that are common among U.S. adults in general. “Most of these causes are not addressed by a program of isolation by age,” she said.
Isolation is very damaging for older adults—but it is very damaging for everyone, Dr. Finkelstein pointed out. Studies have consistently found that the rate of older adults suffering from anxiety or depression during the pandemic, while terrible, is lower than the rate among adults overall. There are “very inspiring perspectives,” she said, “from older adults who are weathering this storm, many of them, with an attitude of resilience and hope that comes partly from having weathered other storms,” such as the Depression, the Holocaust, the Jim Crow era, and battles for civil rights.
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