Paper short abstract:

For older residents in a rural Latvian nursing home, the Covid-19 restrictions became a medium to channel one’s feelings of changed kin relations and un-belonging preexisting the pandemic, partially related to out-migration after the 2008-2009 economic crisis.

Paper long abstract:

In fall 2020, under strict Covid-19 quarantine, a 93-year-old woman Lidija living in a Latvian rural nursing home repeatedly told me that the Latvian government invented the SARS-CoV-2 virus to repatriate emigrated Latvian citizens back to Latvia and thus, assumingly, “fix” broken kin relations including family care for older adults. When asked whether, in her opinion, the virus is real, she always confirmed it is. She was also well informed about the dangers that SARS-CoV-2 brings. Far from being the only one, Lidija, however, made the most distinguished connection between the Covid-19 pandemic, the aftermath of the out-migration after the economic crisis in 2008-2009, her current sense of isolation, and ideas of who should care for whom including the state.

In this paper, I engage with Lidija’s and other residents’ experiences of Covid-19 related quarantine at the rural Latvian nursing home by looking in-depth how these people – deemed by the government as the most vulnerable ones – dealt with Covid-19 related risks. First, I touch upon how the Covid-19 pandemic further challenged the relationship between care and social connectedness. Second, I show that the Covid-19 pandemic served as an exacerbation of other unresolved issues concerning imagined kin relations and the state’s role in re-creating them. Third, I argue that the nursing home residents used the pandemic as a medium to channel and explain their frustrations like isolation, loneliness, and un-belonging that existed before the pandemic and included larger socio-economic issues and ideas of morally right kin.