A Journal Continues Its Examination of the Pandemic’s Effects on Older Adults

A Third Special Edition of JASP Takes the Longer View of COVID’s Impacts

Five years ago this month, the United States declared a public health emergency due to COVID-19. That spring, as people were sent home from offices and schools, unsure what would happen next, Edward Alan Miller, Ph.D., editor-in-chief of the Journal of Aging & Social Policy (JASP) and professor in the Gerontology Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, began work on a special issue dedicated to the emerging crisis. In June 2020, he published the free-access issue, Older Adults and COVID-19: Implications for Aging Policy and Practice, which included 28 scholarly articles about COVID’s effects on older adults.

A year later, Miller published a second special issue of JASP focused on COVID, The COVID-19 Pandemic and Older Adults: Experiences, Impacts, and Innovations. This issue continued the investigation into the effects of COVID on older adults, as well as their caregivers, and it included both original empirical research and commentary. Both issues were later released as books.

Now, nearly five years later, Miller has published the third issue of JASP addressing COVID, Continuing Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Older Adults. Published in December 2024, this issue includes 25 articles from researchers from around the world, covering such topics as vaccine mandates, racial and ethnic disparities, long-term facilities, and age-based COVID regulations. The managing editor of this issue, as for the other two, was Elizabeth Simpson, a doctoral candidate in gerontology at UMass Boston. Like the other two COVID-19 issues, this issue will be published as a book as well.

“This third issue takes a longer view than the first two issues on the research pertaining to COVID,” Miller says. “Putting these 25 articles together in one volume will hopefully further draw attention to the work around COVID and its impacts globally, particularly for older adults.”

The issue applies an international lens to COVID’s effects on older adults, including stories from researchers in Ireland, Italy, Turkey, Isreal, and China. It includes diverse voices from within the United States as well, such as Native American, rural, and homeless communities. These pieces reveal shared challenges globally, including ageism which led to policy responses that addressed people by age instead of risk level. Yet the journal revealed key differences, too.

“There are some commonalities, cross nationally, to the COVID response, but then there have been differences as well,” Miller says. “Countries took different approaches to addressing the pandemic; responses even varied within countries, whether across regions, provinces, cities, or states. This variation enables us to see what works and what doesn’t work, contributing to needed refinements in policy and practice. JASP contributes to that conversation by providing a platform for the research and insights on which those lessons may be learned.”

When the pandemic began causing shutdowns five years ago, Miller remembered a concern in the scholarly community that COVID would lessen the volume of research produced as researchers’ attention would understandably be diverted by the need to keep their colleagues, students, families, and themselves safe. That hasn’t been the case, however.

“We found that the volume of research just skyrocketed during COVID,” Miller says. “It was timely, and it was something that you could investigate, write about and contribute to the pool of knowledge with concrete effects on people’s lives and understanding in real time”