How are you doing?

Artist's impression

It's easy for me to feel at this moment that the pandemic is turning a corner. My second shot will be fully activated by early next week -- I know enough to know that I'm finally at very, very low risk of getting sick with COVD. Yippee!!

But the next few months might be disturbing. Something like a half to three quarters or more of people over 55 will have immunity, while most younger people will remain unvaccinated,  Are the generations going to resent each other? Will the disparity make us uneasy -- a little crazy -- in new and as yet unknown ways?

Mulling these issues, I particularly miss my friend Ronni Bennett who for 15 years built a community which shared notes on getting older, built on the truth that every person ages in their own way and time. She'd have plumbed this discrepancy; I can but try.

Back at the beginning of January, social scientists were expressing some astonishment with how well old people were doing through lockdown, isolation, and fear of infection.

A surprise of the pandemic has been how well many older adults have adapted to the restrictions. “There’s crisis competence,” said Mark Brennan-Ing, a senior research scientist at Hunter College’s Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging. “As we get older, we get the sense that we’re going to be able to handle it, because we’ve been able to handle challenges in the past. You know you get past it. These things happen, but there’s an end to it, and there’s a life after that.

”While people of all ages have struggled this year, those 65 and up are still more likely to rate their mental health as excellent compared with people under 50. ...

John Leland's article, from which I've pulled this quote, is a sweet story of a particular elder's coping experience. If you missed it, take a look.

This week, as we move into what we believe and hope is the pandemic endgame, we get a report of a broad social science study comparing the emotional health and elders and younger folks during the time of the disease.

... psychologists at the University of British Columbia exhaustively surveyed some 800 adults of all ages in the first couple of months of the pandemic — and found the same thing.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has led to an outbreak of ageism, in which public discourse has portrayed older adults as a homogeneous, vulnerable group,” the authors conclude. “Our investigation of the daily life amid the outbreak suggests the opposite: Older age was associated with less concern about the threat of Covid-19, better emotional well-being, and more daily positive events.” ... Older people, especially those with some resources, have more ability than younger adults to soften the edges of a day, by paying for delivery, hiring help, staying comfortably homebound and — crucially — doing so without young children underfoot.

That feels right. Some of us -- I'm one -- can truly say we've had a pretty good pandemic. Sure, my habits and plans have been disrupted. Participating in church on zoom isn't what I consider quite the real thing (though that's narrow minded of me.)  I wasn't able to go out of state to work on the fall election, but -- after things got organized -- phoning became reasonably well-done and perhaps efficacious for voter turnout. So I did that. Since January 5, I've focused on Walking San Francisco, completing in two and half months about the amount of the city I might have walked by July in a different year. Not a bad pandemic here.

I expect the next phase to be confusing. I'm already chafing at having to wear a mask while walking outside. But I accept that solidarity demands this, even if the science might not, until more people are vaccinated.

A group of old women I'm part of that has not had our face-to-face meetings for a year decided we weren't ready to get together in the same room, even though we're all vaccinated. There's a learned hesitancy we'll have to overcome. 

On the other hand, I expect to see older friends in person and inside without masks during this coming week -- we're all fully vaccinated. 

The interruptions in younger people's lives have been so much more drastic than has been the case for elders who don't live with children; they've suffered remote school, no graduation celebrations, no casual socializing, deferred weddings, delayed first jobs ... It's going to be incumbent on elders to ask, how are they doing? People are resilient, but this has been hard.