This half-day seminar focused on assisting the Division of Behavioral and Social Research (BSR) of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to think through a research agenda on the medium- and long-term social and economic impacts of COVID-19, with racial/ethnic, sex, and socioeconomic disparities of these impacts being an integral part. Understanding the social and economic effects of the pandemic cannot be separated from either the inequalities proceeding the pandemic or on the disparate ways that the pandemic is already playing out (e.g., infections, hospitalizations, mortality, job loss, etc.). Indeed, it is now well known that the pandemic is exhibiting its most severe mortality effects in the United States on American Indians, Hispanics, and Blacks. Low socioeconomic status is not only an important mediator through which race and ethnicity translates into higher risk of COVID-19 deaths for minority populations, but may be important in and of itself for putting people in precarious living and work situations that translate into differential risk. And sex differences are likely to be just as important for understanding the short-and long-term effects of the pandemic, with women bearing the brunt of job losses, additional caregiving duties, assisting their children with remote learning, and serving in many risky job contexts since the pandemic began. Lessons learned from the effects of previous “shocks” (e.g., the Great Recession, natural disasters) on medium- and long-term outcomes may be an important way to help develop a research agenda on these topics.
The seminar focused on the medium- (up to five years) and long-term (more than five years) effects of pandemic-related: 1) disruptions to the educational process for children, youth, and young adults; 2) disruptions to work for working-age adults; and 3) changes in the caregiving duties of working-age Americans, particularly women. The seminar addressed racial/ethnic, sex, and socioeconomic disparities in these processes and effects; the life course and the ways in which these effects are going to play out as individuals and groups age over the next decade and beyond; and ways to use existing longitudinal data resources to understand these effects and for the possibility of new strategic data collection efforts that might accelerate research on these topics.
