Introduction : the challenges facing ageing during COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic struck like a lightning on a clear sunny day. When reports surfaced on the probability of a new pandemic in the frst two months of 2020, the public felt no need for alarm. Many remembered the 2009–2010 H1N1 fu pandemic, which affected an estimated 61 million people, but caused only an estimated 275,000 hospitalisations and 12,500 deaths, and failed to entrench itself in most countries. Such a reaction could not be farther away from the future situation as the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be a totally different matter. Its rate of transmission was incredibly contagious and its death rate amongst older persons was extremely high. Hopes that COVID-19 will not break out from China were soon confounded as it ravaged Northern Italy and brought hospitals and intensive care units in this region to breaking point. In a matter of weeks, other countries registered thousands of cases and an approximately 3.5% mortality rate when this fgure for H1N1 fu pandemic was solely 0.2%. It is therefore understandable that since mid-2020 the scholarly arena has been now awash with policy reports and empirical research focusing on the aetiology and the wide-ranging economic, social and psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.