Continuing Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Older Adults

The rapid onset of the COVID-19 pandemic presented a multi-faceted challenge to older adults, carers, and care institutions globally. A wide range of policies aimed at protecting older adults from serious illness and death from COVID-19–including prioritizing vaccination for older adults, mandating vaccination among health care workers, and stringent isolation measures–achieved some success in mitigating these outcomes. However, older adults continue to bear the burden of risk for these most severe outcomes. Additionally, some early efforts to protect older adults, often via extreme isolation measures both within care facilities and in the community, yielded unanticipated health and psychosocial impacts on older adults and care and service networks and revealed systemic ageism in health and social policies worldwide. This special issue of the Journal of Aging & Social Policy compiles research conducted both during and after the height of the pandemic on the impacts of immediate response efforts, while delving into the longer-term differential effects across population subgroups and organizations. Governments, agencies, and aging services organizations will benefit from fully considering lessons learned and incorporating them into future emergency response efforts.