Pandemic puts spotlight on eldercare

China has made an array of changes in its COVID-19 response. From Jan 8, the country started managing the novel coronavirus pandemic with measures designed to combat Category B, instead of Category A, infectious diseases.

The focus of China's new set of COVID-19 response measures is on protecting people's health and preventing serious cases. And as a vulnerable and high-risk group, the elderly deserve special attention, especially because the strict anti-pandemic measures have been eased.

The immune system of elderly people is relatively weak due to many factors, including aging and underlying chronic diseases. According to the National Health Commission, by the end of 2018 more than 180 million senior citizens were suffering from chronic diseases, with 75 percent of them having more than one chronic disease. Among people aged 60 or above, 58.3 percent had hypertension and 19.4 percent diabetes, and over 40 million elderly people had functional disability.

National Health Commission data show that 267 million people, or 18.9 percent of the total population, were aged 60 or above at the end of 2021 and, hence, were more vulnerable to COVID-19.

The authorities should also pay greater attention to senior citizens' mental health, because the pandemic has had a huge impact on people's mental well-being over the past three years. The several waves of infection and the subsequent changes in the prevention and control measures created a lot of uncertainties for the older generation, leaving them frustrated, worried and anxious. It is also important to arrange for counseling apart from ensuring proper medical treatment for them.

Efforts should also be made to protect senior citizens from falling victim to fraudsters because many of them are not tech-savvy or well-off enough to afford advanced electronic devices. Also, the pandemic has further highlighted elderly people's difficulties in using digital technology, and without digital technology a person cannot expect to access information on the pandemic and seek medical help to combat it, even though the elderly have started to grasp some of the digital functions such as online chatting, shopping and scanning QR codes and therefore are less likely to fall prey to scammers.

According to a 2021 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences report, 93.67 percent of elderly netizens view using the internet as an integral part of daily life, with 17.25 percent of them admitting they had been victims of online fraudsters, particularly those selling healthcare and financial products.

Further, socialized care services for the aged should be promoted because many nuclear families, unlike the extended families in the past, do not have enough energy, money and/or time to take care of older family members.

According to the Seventh National Census conducted in 2020, the average size of a household is 2.62 persons, meaning young people after marriage tend to live separately, that is, not with their parents.

Kindergartens and schools provide socialized childcare and education, ensuring the kids receive higher-quality care than those children who receive home-based care. Similarly, socialized care services are more beneficial to the elderly than family care.

Since elderly-friendly infrastructure and environment are essential for upgrading the eldercare sector, policymakers must adopt measures in line with the changing demographic structure to promote home-based care and community nursing services, help develop elderly-specific internet platforms, and improve public transportation and residential buildings in urban and rural areas to meet senior citizens' needs.

There is also a need to introduce related laws and regulations to adapt to the aging society and ensure sustainable development.

The eldercare sector has been badly hit by the pandemic. It also has to cope with shrinking pension funds and shortage of nursing staff. According to Ministry of Civil Affairs data, in 2020 more than 2 million senior citizens checked into about 40,000 long-term care facilities, but there were only 370,000 staff members to take care of them. And only 200,000 of the staff members were skilled caregivers.

In other words, one skilled eldercare worker in China has to attend to at least 10 senior citizens in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, since it is very difficult to recruit and retain people in the industry owing to the demanding nature of the job and poor pay.

As such, innovative administrative, economic and social platforms should be established to support the eldercare industry. The administrative platforms need to ensure people get equal access to public services, by integrating the digital and real economies, improving care services and providing the full range of services for senior citizens. As for the economic platforms, they should use new technologies to reform traditional operational methods by linking them with the internet and the internet of things. And the innovative social platform should be transformed into a new ecological structure to help enterprises solve the social, economic and environmental problems of the elderly.

Although the upgrading of eldercare services in an aging society is led by the central government, it can be successful only with the help and active involvement of society, enterprises, families and people themselves. So the authorities should introduce supportive policies and devise new cooperative models to attract more entities to jointly develop the eldercare industry.

Effectively meeting the needs of China's aging population will have a bearing on overall national development and the well-being of hundreds of millions of people, and help maintain social harmony and stability.

China's demographic dividends have been shrinking, with the country becoming an aging society due to the declining fertility rate and increasing life expectancy. And since China's very low population growth and the pandemic's impacts are intertwined, it is necessary to immediately upgrade the eldercare services.

The author is deputy head of the Aging Society Research Center at the Pangoal Institution.

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.