Enza Simeone (p)

Lucía Gómez Balcácer

Using 2019 pre-pandemic data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) and November 2020 pandemic data from the UKHLS COVID-19 survey, this work aims to assessing whether the general health status of the UK population is affected by the different periods of implementation in UK regions of the second “Stay-at-home” lockdown policy, observing the heterogeneous effect across UK regions and by gender. In particular, the second lockdown policy was introduced as mandatory in November 2020 in England and in January 2021 in Scotland.
The findings show that in November 2020 the second "Stay-at-home" measure reduced the probability of falling into the highest health status categories in England by 10 percentage points compared to Scotland. Furthermore, the impact was statistically significant for women, with a reduction in the probability of having a very good/excellent health status of 15 percentage points.
Overall, the findings confirm that even during the second wave of the pandemic, coronavirus disease exacerbated existing inequalities and amplified the gradients of exposure to the disease itself and the economic impact of the several lockdown policies implemented.

Rumeysa Bayar (p)

Enza Simeone

Population ageing has become an inevitable end for all countries and 18.4 % per cent of people aged 65 and above live in urban areas. In 2007, World Health Organisation provided eight key dimensions. These criteria have been subject to planning cities providing an equal environment for all ages. In addition to all these, the living environment has become more important for older people in natural hazards such as a pandemic. COVID-19 started to infect people and spread very quickly in December 2019. The most important characteristic of this disease is that it becomes deadly for older people. By the beginning of March 2020, nearly all countries in the world have been on lockdown to stop infections. Many countries have provided strict rules for people who are aged 65 and above such as staying at home all day, and not contacting people face to face. Those who were not able to use the internet or have no one to help them have suffered from loneliness and isolation. They were dependent on someone else for food delivery, they have been dealing with emotional stress and anxiety. Therefore, this research aims to focus on older adults’ daily life during the lockdown and how they have been affected by isolation from the urban environment and social life; and also staying at home. How living environment and neighbourhood have helped their engagement with daily life during the lockdown also the research is comparing the daily life routine of older adults before the pandemic to those during the pandemic. The data is collected through semi-structured interviews and due to social distancing and to protect participants from any infections, interviews were held over a phone call in June 2020 and July 2020. There are 30 questions and the researcher took notes during the call. 6 Participants were interviewed based on the researcher's personal network and through community workers in Bristol in different neighbourhoods randomly. The findings highlighted that having a garden or being close to a park or a green area has helped older people to overcome isolation and loneliness. As open green spaces are the main aspects of the urban environment to support ageing well. Because older people can perform activities and socialise in open green spaces. The first rule for the pandemic was social distancing and staying home, however, for older people who especially live alone isolation caused serious depression.

Lucía Gómez Balcácer (p), Noelia Somarriba Arechavala, Patricia Gómez Costilla

Rumeysa Bayar

The policies implemented in the EU to curb the spread of COVID-19 have proven effective from an epidemiological point of view, although their true effect on the well-being of the population is still unknown. Social relationships are an essential part of human evolution, and their absence has generated anxiety, depression and mental disorders that have drastically reduced the subjective well-being of individuals. We apply multilevel structural equation modeling (GSEM) to gauge what role social capital plays in the happiness of Europeans, using data from the Life, Work and COVID-19 survey conducted by Eurofound. We controlled for the effect of factors such as gender, employment, age, lack of income, education and whether or not the individual lives in a rural area. Using the applied models, we identified significant links between happiness and social capital at the macro and micro levels. The research results suggest that institutional distrust has a negative effect on the well-being of the population by generating a climate of uncertainty that hinders recovery from the health crisis, which hinders social cohesion and fosters disintegration and polarization.