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Governing Risk and Older Age During COVID-19: Contextualizing Ageism and COVID-19 Outbreaks in Australian Aged Care Facilities During 2020

Version 2 2024-09-18, 23:47
Version 1 2023-07-04, 00:42
chapter
posted on 2023-07-04, 00:42 authored by Peta CookPeta Cook, Barbara Barbosa Neves, Cassie Curryer, Susan Banks, Annetta Mallon, Jack Lam, Maho Omori

The infectious spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has gener-ated numerous media and political responses that bring together health, risk, and age. Within these responses, older people have been cast as “the vulnerable elderly” who are less socially worthy and valuable than younger people, in poor health, and considered to be automatically at risk of COVID-19 due to their age. This simplistic connection between older age, frailty, and ill-health reduces older age to a medical and health problem, which perpetuates and deepens ageism. The implied connection has been particularly evident during the coronavirus pandemic through the imposition on older people, who are living in aged and long-term care facilities, of severe lockdown restrictions enforced through the processes of risk governmentality and authoritative control. These socio-political and institutional regulations have heightened the isola-tion from society that older people living in such environments already face, ironically further threatening their health and wellbeing. Drawing on Australian media reports and specific institutional responses imposed on or emerging from residential aged care that occurred during 2020, our theoretical examination reveals how ageism, risk discourses, and risk governance during the coronavirus pandemic jeopardized older Australian’s health, wellbeing, and dignity of risk, while also reinforcing barriers to social inclusion. We conclude with suggestions for dealing with ageism including challenging the medicalisation of older age, promoting and supporting older people’s dignity of risk, and radically changing our attitudes towards, and language regarding, ageing.

History

Publication title

Handbook on COVID-19 Pandemic and Older Persons Narratives and Issues from India and beyond

Editors

M Kapur Shankardass

ISBN

9819914663

Publisher

Springer

Publication status

  • Published

Place of publication

Singapore

Extent

40

Rights statement

Copyright 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. M. K. Shankardass (ed.), Handbook on COVID-19 Pandemic and Older Persons, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1467-8_18

Socio-economic Objectives

280123 Expanding knowledge in human society

UN Sustainable Development Goals

3 Good Health and Well Being, 10 Reduced Inequalities

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