Older People Facing the Crisis of COVID-19: Between Fragility and Resilience

Abstract

The health crisis we are facing is challenging seniors’ resources and capacities for adaptation and resilience. The PACOVID survey, set up a few days after containment, investigates their psychological and social experiences with regard to the COVID-19 crisis and to what extent these characteristics, representations and attitudes have an impact on health and mortality. A telephone survey is being carried out on 935 people already followed up in the framework of ongoing epidemiological studies. As we are writing this article, the interviews conducted during the containment have just ended. Even though we will have to wait for the analysis of the results to draw conclusions, words collected by the psychologists during the interviews already illustrate a great heterogeneity in the way older adults lived this experience: social isolation, anxiety, the importance of family and the difficulty of being deprived of it, but also remarkable coping skills and resilience capacities.