The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Informal and Formal Care Disruption and Older Adults’ Psychological Distress: Evidence from the Household Longitudinal Study-Understanding Society

This paper exploits individual-level data from the U.K. Household Longitudinal Study (U.K.HLS), Understanding Society, to investigate how formal and informal caregiving disruptions, due to the U.K. government’s non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) aimed at reducing transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, may have affected the likelihood of psychological distress among older individuals. We model the association between disruption of formal and informal care and mental health of the elderly during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic using a recursive simultaneous equation model for binary variables. Our findings reveal that public interventions, most essential for reducing the pandemic spread, influenced the provision of formal and informal care. The burden of formal and informal care disruption has mainly fallen on older adults with underlying medical conditions and therefore at higher risk of COVID-19 complications and related death. The lack of adequate social care following the COVID-19 outbreak has had a negative repercussion on the psychological well-being of these adults.