Pandemic Depression + Age

Using telephone and web survey data to study the impact of social determinants and health-related factors on depressive symptoms during the initial lockdown that started in March 2020 in Canada, Raina et al. (2021) came to the conclusion that overall, older adults had "twice the odds of depressive symptoms during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic". Further factors having an impact were. lower income, poorer health, loneliness, caregiving responsibilities, separation from family, family conflict, and gender (women were more affected).

"The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionated impact on older adults, with groups of people who were already marginalized feeling a far greater negative impact." Parminder Raina

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- Raina, P., Wolfson, C., Griffith, L., Kirkland, S., McMillan, J., Basta, N. Joshi, D., Erbas-Oz, U., Sohel, N., Maimon, G., Thompson, E. &  CLSA team (2021). A longitudinal analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of middle-aged and older adults from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Nature Aging, 1, 1137- 1147; link
- photograph by Harvey Stein via

The Pandemic. The Best Time for Elder Financial Abuse.

"Abusers are using the threat of the virus and the isolation to provide misinformation to people. One of the threats that abusers are using is… 'If you don't hand over your check, I can get you put into a nursing home, and you will die there' or 'If you don't hand over your check, I'll come visit you, and I've been out and exposed. Being locked in the house with the person they might be most afraid of — who might be threatening, hurting or manipulating them — it takes a situation that was rocky beforehand and makes it worse in this environment. We expect that it's getting worse."
Bonnie Brandl



photograph by Richard Kalvar (NYC, 1969) via

Our Silence. Our Indifference. Our Failure.

In Australia, elderly people in privately-run care homes account for three quarters of COVID-10 deaths (via), in Canada it is 80% (via). In Massachusetts, the death rate from the virus in nursing homes is 90 times that of the statewide one (via). Nursing homes in Walnut Creek and Concord (California) account for 70% of COVID-19 deaths. In Conta Costra, 71 of 102 COVID-19 deaths involve care facilities (via). New York's COVID-19 death toll in nursing homes is one of the highest in the U.S. although only those are counted who die on nursing home property statistically ignoring those who are transported to hospitals and die there (via). As of July 2020, 30.000 more care home residents died during the COVID-10 outbreak in England and Wales than during the same period in 2019 (via). In Sweden we talk about 70% (via), in Italy, France, Ireland, Spain, and Belgium 42% to 57% of deaths from the virus took place in nursing homes ... a "silent massacre" as they say in Italy (via).

... in memoriam Rudi.

"Belgian society has decided that the lives of these confined elderly counted much less than those of the so-called ‘actives’."
Geoffrey Players

It was an ominous warning on March 27 that the deadly virus may have the ability to spread rapidly and invisibly among the most vulnerable. But it was a warning not heeded here: That very day, Massachusetts leaders unveiled a hastily arranged plan to shuffle hundreds of symptom-free — and untested — residents from one nursing home to others to clear room for older COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals.

There was still time to hit the pause button. No one did.

And so it began. Over the next three cold and gloomy days, medical workers moved 137 elderly women and men, many with dementia, out of their familiar rooms at Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center in Worcester, loaded them into ambulances, and scattered them among 18 facilities. They were people like 92-year-old Frannie Trotto, who never recovered from the sudden and disorienting uprooting. Neither she nor the others were tested for COVID-19 because state guidelines at the time called for swabbing only those with a fever or cough. And some may have brought the virus to their new homes. (via)

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photograph by Harold Feinstein via

The Elderly, the Pandemic, ... Our Indifference.

(...) Notice how the all-too-familiar rhetoric of dehumanization works: “The elderly” are bunched together as a faceless mass, all of them considered culprits and thus effectively deserving of the suffering the pandemic will inflict upon them. Lost entirely is the fact that the elderly are individual human beings, each with a distinctive face and voice, each with hopes and dreams, memories and regrets, friendships and marriages, loves lost and loves sustained. But they deserve to die—and as for us, we can just go about our business. (...)



What does it say about our society that people think of the elderly so dismissively—and moreover, that they feel no shame about expressing such thoughts publicly? I find myself wondering whether this colossal moral failure is exacerbated by the most troubled parts of our cultural and economic life. When people are measured and valued by their economic productivity, it is easy to treat people whose most economically productive days have passed as, well, worthless.

From a religious perspective, if there is one thing we ought to teach our children, it is that our worth as human beings does not depend on or derive from what we do or accomplish or produce; we are, each of us, infinitely valuable just because we are created in the image of God. We mattered before we were old enough to be economically productive, and we will go on mattering even after we cease to be economically productive.

Varied ethical and religious traditions find their own ways to affirm an elemental truth of human life: The elderly deserve our respect and, when necessary, our protection. The mark of a decent society is that it resists the temptation to spurn the defenseless. It is almost a truism that the moral fabric of a society is best measured by how it treats the vulnerable in its midst—and yet it is a lesson we never seem to tire of forgetting. “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old,” the Bible says—look out for them and, in the process, become more human yourself.

Shai Held (president, dean, and chair in Jewish Thought at Hadar)

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potograph by wonderful Vivian Maier via