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CityAndStateNY.com
August 16, 2021
The other side of quarantine How living in isolation for the past 15 months has harmed New York’s seniors.
By Amanda Luz Henning Santiago
While seniors distanced from others during the pandemic, isolation has had unintended consequences.
such as going back to senior centers and visiting their vaccinated family members. Other seniors, however, have deteriorated both physically and mentally due to their time in isolation. As the coronavirus began to rapidly spread throughout New York more than a year ago, people were barred from visiting nursing home residents. Senior centers closed. While the city and state acted in accordance with CDC guidance, some health care experts have begun to examine the harm that was also done by keeping seniors completely isolated. “When we look back on this in the years to come, I imagine there’s going to be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking around whether it was a good idea to blockade older adults in their nursing home rooms for eight, nine, 10 months out of the year without letting them have access to their families,” David Grabowski, a health
care policy professor at Harvard University’s medical school, told The Atlantic in January. “I think we’re going to look back and say, ‘What the hell were we doing?’” ELDERLY NEW YORKERS, like seniors across the country, had already been more prone to feelings of loneliness and isolation due to retirement, cognitive or physical issues and shrinking social circles, which were then exacerbated considerably because of the pandemic. While those residing in nursing homes had different experiences than those living at home or in a retirement community, both populations faced similar challenges: a lack of personal connection with those around them. In January, Beth Finkel, who is the state director of AARP New York, told NPR that “being isolated is equal to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” Loneliness has, in fact, been cited as the cause of premature mor-
ALEJANDRO IVAN SUAREZ/SHUTTERSTOCK
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HROUGHOUT THE PAST year and a half, New York’s older adults, perhaps more than any other group, have been encouraged not to leave their homes over concerns that they may contract the coronavirus and get very sick. Even in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, older individuals over 65 were warned of the serious threat that the virus posed to them. As of January 2021, 8 in 10 coronavirus-related deaths were among seniors, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fortunately, vaccination efforts in New York have largely been a success among older adults. Nearly 82% of people ages 65 and up in New York have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Despite the state’s precarious future with the spread of the delta variant, many older adults are able to return to some of the pre-pandemic activities they enjoyed,
