Being old during the corona virus pandemic: The impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the state policies on older persons

Old age, which is considered the last stage of human life, has rapidly become a life stage experienced by many people both in Turkey and around the world. It is a newer phenomenon compared to cases such as old age, infancy and youth. Since the average life expectancy was 30-40 years in the past, very few people went through the old age process, so our knowledge about old age is limited. However, the number of elderly people is increasing rapidly in all societies due to reasons such as developing health technologies, increasing welfare level, and decreasing wars. The elderly make up a significant percentage of the community population. According to the World Health Organization, people aged 65 and over are defined as elderly. However, the elderly can also be divided into "young old people", "advanced old people" and "very advanced old people". The elderly are a heterogeneous group with political power to influence society. Therefore, policies to be implemented for the elderly have gained importance. The society we live in can be defined as a society of risks and uncertainties in many respects. Phenomena such as risk, danger, insecurity and fear are placed at the center of people's actions. Security has become the main force of the risk society. In such an atmosphere, with the emergence of the corona virus epidemic and its becoming a pandemic in a short time, people all over the world experienced great fear and panic. With the inadequacy of individual measures against the risk of corona virus, the need for state intervention has become mandatory. With the increase in the importance of the nation state again, every aspect of the lives of individuals has become the object of administration.Since the risk has spread to every part of daily life and cannot be seen with the naked eye, states have eliminated all kinds of behaviors that are thought to be risky. By determining the "new normal" of the society, daily life was reorganized. In the face of risks, positions of risk occur, in the face of risks some are more endangered. In the face of the risk of corona virus, it was stated that people aged 65 and over, whose immune system was weakened at the beginning of the epidemic, were more at risk than others, so it was the group that felt the state intervention the most. However, since risks progress with a different sharing logic, risk ultimately affects everyone, including those who produce it. Due to the fact that the corona virus is the biggest epidemic of the 21st century, it has been perceived much differently in the risk society, which has different characteristics from the past. The group most affected by this epidemic, aged 65 and over (the elderly), is a group that is not as visible as other age groups in the society, and its numbers have started to increase in recent years, so the characteristics of this group are not fully known and the elderly are approached with prejudice. In this study, it is aimed to perceive the elderly as a group with many different characteristics, different experiences and socio-cultural characteristics like other age groups, and to determine how they are affected by the policies applied during the corona virus epidemic. The population of this study is Aydın and Burdur provinces, which have an elderly population of over 10%. In the light of the data collected by the questionnaire technique applied on 537 people selected by simple random sampling, it basically tries to reveal the experiences of old age in the face of the restrictions they were exposed to during the corona virus epidemic, and the ways of perceiving the corona virus. KEY WORDS: Agingand Society, Corona Virus, Governmentality, Pandemic, Risk society