The “Aging Disaster” of COVID-19: Prof. Gonyea and PhD Student O’Donnell Examine the Impact of Social Isolation on Boston’s Older Residents

Judith Gonyea, professor and associate dean of faculty affairs at BUSSW, is one of five BU faculty to receive funding from BU’s Initiative on Cities (IOC) call for COVID-19 Urban Research-to-Action proposals. Working with Co-PI PhD student Arden O’Donnell, in collaboration with the City of Boston’s Age Strong Commission, Gonyea and the team will examine the experiences of Boston residents age 60 and older during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given their risk of severe complications from the virus, adults age 60 and older have been told to stay at home and self-isolate. However, recent research suggests that social isolation and loneliness pose other significant health risks including heart disease, diabetes, immune suppression, anxiety, and depression.

Gonyea and O’Donnell, with the support of the Commission (led by BUSSW alum Emily Shea), will survey a racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse sample of 120 Bostonians age 60 or older in English, Spanish, or Cantonese. They will explore the strategies that older adults have adopted in response to stay-at-home directives and study whether and how older adults have been able to maintain social connections. They will also examine how stay at home directives have impacted elderly residents’ sense of isolation, loneliness, perceived health, psychological wellbeing, and material hardship such as food insecurity and cutting back on medications.

According to the researchers, a recent analysis of social isolation and loneliness studies estimated its health damage to increase the risk of early death by 26 percent. In fact, even before the pandemic, more than one in four U.S. older adults reported that they felt isolated. This sense of loneliness, combined with older adults’ heightened susceptibility to COVID-19, creates a double threat to seniors’ lives.

The former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated, “The brunt of COVID-19 will be borne by the poor, elderly, and sick, and it is up to us to ensure that they are not left behind.”  As Gonyea points out, “Although the “elderly” are often spoken about as a monolithic group, they are a diverse population in terms of characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and income, as well as health, living arrangements, and housing. Indeed, a significant proportion of older Americans also fall into Murthy’s categories of ‘poor’ and ‘sick’. This group—many of whom are urban dwellers—may face greater vulnerability during the pandemic.”

Recently BU’s Initiative on Cities (IOC) has issued a call for COVID-19 Urban Research-to-Action Proposals to support new faculty-led research to better understand and address the disproportionate impacts the COVID-19 pandemic is having on marginalized urban residents, including but not limited to communities of color, low income communities, the elderly, immigrants and the homeless. Given the urgency of the crisis, they expressed particular interest in proposals that will yield more immediate results.