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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how ethnography might align with other disciplinary methods to make sense of care home mortalities during covid-19 that were not caused by covid-19 disease itself, but rather the social response to covid-19: lockdown.

Paper long abstract:

Older adults are one of the most at-risk populations for severe and fatal covid-19 disease. To protect at-risk older adults from covid-19 disease, many countries imposed harsh lockdown measures on care homes. Despite these strong measures, covid-19 disease ran rampant in care homes, causing mass deaths and eliciting much scholarly attention. Though the focus on the rapid spread of covid-19 disease in care homes has shed critical light on how politically and economically unsupported care homes are, scholars are now increasingly turning their attention to an under-studied, yet vast amount of care home mortalities during covid-19 that were not caused by covid-19 disease, but rather covid-19's social response: lockdown. These deaths are being called ‘confinement syndrome’ (Diamantis et al. 2020), which involves the synergistic interaction between: dehydration and malnutrition; physical and functional decline; exacerbation of chronic medical conditions and mental health disorders; cognitive decline and delirium; worsening of responsive behaviours; loneliness and social isolation; and psychological distress, depression, and anxiety. While care home workers suggest that confinement syndrome has been more deleterious than covid-19 itself, the ethical dangers of conducting research in care homes during covid-19 have made it difficult to study this phenomenon in depth. In this paper, then, I will draw on an ethnography in care homes pre-covid-19 and a recent experience on an interdisciplinary ageing research team to think through how ethnography might align with other disciplinary methods in future to capture the biosocial, ongoing impact of lockdown on older adults.