“Not until my brother, a kind man in his early 60s, rang the other day and offered to collect my shopping did I realise I was old.” That line from writer Peter Cunningham about cocooning back in the charged early days of Covid distilled a certain truth.
“I don’t see myself as old. But now it’s different. Now it doesn’t matter that I think I’m 52, or, after half a bottle of wine, 32, because I’m 72, and for that reason I am confined to my home and garden under a sort of quasi-house arrest, quaintly known as cocooning. Just the other day we were booking our holiday flights and choosing the vegetarian meal option on the plane. Now we’re living in a cocoon. Crazy.”
Tomorrow will mark five years since Leo Varadkar introduced “cocooning” for people over 70 or with a long-term illness. Cocooning, to cite the HSE, meant “you should stay at home at all times and avoid face-to-face contact. Even within your home, you should minimise all non-essential contact with other members of your household ...”
I, being a few years short of 70, suddenly felt like a gambolling lamb. I could shop for myself without a busybody child wondering aloud about my teacake predilection and walk the roads like a normal person while catching up with the friends cocooning from behind a hedge. Even there, some looked furtive about being outside. What lodges in the memory is that great psychological abyss of powerlessness between them and everyone else.
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Weeks beforehand, many had already embarked on their own lockdown. Some left overnight hospital bags permanently ready in the hallway. It wasn’t government but the news from Italy that alarmed them, Italy with its more robust health service than ours now with coffins being stacked high into military transport vehicles, the scores of newly dug graves, the voices of distraught doctors in overrun hospitals pleading for help.
The threat was real. Between March 2020 and March 2021, 56 per cent of Covid-related hospitalisations in Ireland were in the 65 years and older age group but represented 87 per cent of deaths. The notion that we might, through carelessness, require a precious ICU bed or rare-as-gold-dust ventilator was unconscionable.
Yet that cuddly, infantilising word “cocooning” utterly subverted the reality of three quarters of a million mature, mostly conscientious adults believing they were under immediate house arrest. They had good reason to believe it. The new health measures that included cocooning ended with a note in the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) minutes about legislation and regulation: “Measures above will be reflected in the Regulations under the Health (Preservation and Protection and Other Emergency Measures in the Public Interest) Act 2020 and will be enforced by An Garda Síochána”. Everyone thought cocooning was the law.
After an April 15th column where I plaintively suggested that other age groups should be confined for a change in order to facilitate a daily walk for imprisoned cocooners, the government clarified under questioning that it was merely advisory.
Retired Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin John Neill said there appeared “to have been a deliberate attempt to mislead in public advertising and even by the taoiseach, the minister for health and the chief medical officer”. A report for the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) said “the government has allowed – and probably encouraged – people to believe that they are subject to much broader legal restrictions than is in fact the case” and called it “problematic” from a human rights perspective.
It matters. It’s hardly surprising that the gallop of time is felt more keenly by older generations or that the sense of its loss in dwindling years proves to be more enduring.
To feel younger than you are is powerful medicine. Literally. It has a measurable effect on how long you will live. The converse is also true. Negative stereotyping can make you feel older and will knock several years off your life. In Ireland, a man of 65 can expect to live another 17.6 years. At 65, a woman might have another 19. This is one of the State’s great triumphs, yet the instinct to sweep groups into blobs lay at the heart of cocooning.
It was ageism that enabled the introduction of arbitrary cocooning rules in the first place, said Prof Rose Anne Kenny, founding principal investigator of Tilda, the longitudinal study on the experience of ageing in Ireland. The test is whether it could have happened to any other group. Obese people were hugely at risk from Covid; now imagine if everyone over a certain weight had been told they couldn’t leave the house. But it was easy to introduce those policies because, generally speaking, society is quite ageist, said Prof Kenny; we had no problem picking an age, but failed to ask enough questions about how those policies could impact on age.
A year into the pandemic, a study by researchers at the School of Nursing &Midwifery in Trinity College Dublin with Safeguarding Ireland found that that “there has been an eclipsing of older people in the pandemic”. More than half were still reducing their contact with family and one in five hadn’t left their homes.
Another study three years on, based on Tilda measuring before, during and after Covid, showed that loneliness and depression had gone up threefold during Covid and had not returned to baseline afterwards.
Hindsight is a fine thing but the lessons here are obvious. Healthy over-70s – having been provided with all relevant information, of course – should have been trusted to make their own sensible decisions. And language matters.
