Elder Agency: How Older New Zealanders Played Their Part in Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 Response

ABSTRACT

At higher risk of both contracting COVID-19, and suffering ill effects from it, older people have figured prominently in accounts of the pandemic. In Aotearoa, government messaging enjoined the population to protect older people, who became the implicit subjects of the widely shared appeal to ‘stay home, save lives’. Drawing on interviews with 35 people aged 62 and older, we explore how older New Zealanders imagined their own risk, resilience, and relationships – and in doing so their membership in the imagined community of this island nation. While some of our participants did feel vulnerable to COVID-19 and adjusted their lifestyles accordingly, others felt strong and healthy even as they acknowledged that age was a risk factor that theoretically applied to them. Furthermore, many of the people we spoke to expressed concern for other members of society, asserting a form of agency through solidarity and recognition that went unacknowledged in the dominant social discourse about what it meant to be old in the context of COVID-19. Through these reflections, participants often directly considered how old age figured in political messaging around the pandemic, in some cases feeling cared for and recognised and in others feeling as if age itself had become a political tool. We argue that ‘older’ New Zealanders are a more diverse group than was acknowledged at the time and also a more agentive one, playing a critical contributing role in the pandemic response rather than merely acting as a rationale for public health measures.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• Aotearoa New Zealand
• imagined community
• risk
• old age

Acknowledgements

The authors are most grateful to the people who generously shared their thoughts with us for this research. Dinithi Bowatte provided essential research assistance to this project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A State of Emergency was declared in Aotearoa from 12.21 pm on 25 March 2020. This put the entire country into Level Four lockdown during which residents were allowed to leave their homes only for daily socially-distanced exercise or for essential purposes like buying groceries or accessing medical care. Essential workers were exempt from these rules. The Level Four lockdown lasted until April 27, when the country began to progress down the alert levels. Through 2020 and into the first part of 2021, three regional lockdowns were imposed, mostly in Auckland, and lasting for up to 13 days; on 17 August 2021, the country was plunged back into a Level 4 lockdown at 11.59 pm that night. Most of the country went to Level 3 on 31 August and then Level 2 on the 7th of September, while Auckland stayed in level 4 and then 3 until the Alert Level system was replaced by the traffic Light system on the 2nd of December. The Nothland and Waikato regions had shorter stints of Level 3 lockdown through this time.

2 We aimed for a gender split of 45% female, 45% male, and 10% non-binary, and our final study population was 54% female, 40% men, and 6% non-binary. We ended up with an over-representation of Pākehā (white settler) New Zealanders, with Māori and Pasifika respondants accounting for 6% and 7% of the study population respectively. For this paper, where we limited our analysis to those 35 older participants, five identified as Māori, one as Indian, and the rest as Pākehā (sometimes using the language of ‘NZ European’ or ‘New Zealander’).

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment [Grant UOAX 1941] for funding this project.