Daily activities of older adults before and during the COVID pandemic

This study examines how older adults' (65 years old plus) daily activities shifted in the years around the coronavirus disease (COVID) pandemic.

Using data from American Time Use Survey, this study compares activities across the pre-pandemic (2019 to March 2020), early-pandemic (May to December 2020), and pandemic-normal (2021) periods.

In the first year of the pandemic, there was less time spent on average on leisure outside the home, traveling, and with nonhousehold members, and more time alone and at home, compared with before the pandemic. Moving beyond averages, sequence and cluster analyses find 5 similar typologies of days across the three periods, characterized by days predominated by (a) housework, (b) leisure at home, (c) TV, (d) a combination of leisure at home and outside with TV, and (e) paid work. Duration of time across various daily activities differed, however, even for the same clusters. For example, in days predominated by indoor leisure, adults spent 405 min in this activity before the pandemic, 432 min during the early-pandemic period, and 549 min during the pandemic-normal period. We also observed changes in the proportion of older adults in each cluster. Across the pre-pandemic and early-pandemic periods, the proportion of days predominated by leisure at home increased (9.9%-17.9%) whereas the proportion belonging to days predominated by housework decreased (45.7%-17.6%).

COVID-19 shifted the daily life of older adults, and our findings are consistent with selection, optimization, and compensation theory, documenting that older adult adapted across the first 2 years of the pandemic.