“We must ensure that New York City’s growing population of 1.25 million adults ages 65 and older can access high-quality services, resources, and opportunities that accommodate their needs and preferences, celebrate their strengths and resilience, and empower them to live in the communities they helped build and continue to make meaningful contributions to.”
Last month, New Yorkers bid adieu to the city’s universal contact tracing program after almost two years of service. Trace’s closure represents just one of many signs that the COVID-19 pandemic has entered a new phase in the United States, amid increasing levels of immunity in the population, widespread vaccine and testing availability, and the development of new treatments.
Like Trace, Clio—an organization connecting older adults to essential community resources and volunteers for friendly phone calls on a weekly basis—launched in Spring 2020 to meet the urgent needs of New Yorkers living in the pandemic’s epicenter. At the significantly higher risk of severe illness and mortality from COVID, older adults sheltering in place in New York City found themselves severed from close ties with the communities and resources they had once enjoyed at senior centers, houses of worship, and doctors’ offices, on building stoops and sidewalk benches, and in high-rise hallways, neighborhood parks, and local supermarkets. In response, with seed funding from the Columbia School of Social Work, Clio’s three founders rapidly launched a new program pairing socially isolated older adults in Uptown Manhattan with volunteers assessing their basic needs and providing safe companionship in eight different languages.
Two years, 2,272 phone calls, 137 letters, and 64 care packages later, our 87 volunteers across the country have empowered 75 older adults in some of the New York City neighborhoods most heavily impacted by COVID to continue aging in place with dignity through an unprecedented public health emergency. As more and more in-person programming resumes during this new phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we, like Trace, are closing our doors—and cautioning New Yorkers against future complacency.
Even an endemic disease, as COVID will likely become, can be disabling and sometimes deadly. At Clio, we saw how endemic ageism, or pervasive discrimination against older people due to negative and inaccurate stereotypes, infected the lives of participants as they navigated formidable barriers to accessing meals, groceries, support services, medical care, and vaccines within the ever-shifting parameters of pandemic life.
Many Clio participants found new phone lines and online portals difficult or impossible to use, voicing frustration over being constantly redirected, given different information, or just simply overlooked by systems designed without their unique needs and preferences in mind. Some expressed interest in learning and using Zoom to access virtual programming and connect with friends, but lacked access to devices with cameras and internet connectivity, like many older adults with limited financial means. One Clio participant, who postponed visiting her primary care doctor’s office during the height of the pandemic, told her volunteer she had waited months to seek relief for her chronic pain—only to have the physician dismiss her pain as a “natural part of the aging process.” A participant who has difficulty standing for extended periods of time recounted being yelled at for asking if he might stand near the front of the checkout line at his local grocery store, after it discontinued the hour it had reserved for older shoppers in the early days of the pandemic.
These stories are merely symptoms of the structural inequities that harm the…
Read More: What Older New Yorkers Deserve In the Next Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic