The impact of COVID-19 on the residential care sector for the elderly: employment and care regimes in the European comparative perspective

Residential care for the elderly has been greatly affected by the Covid-19 crisis. Several studies have highlighted the higher incidence of infections and mortality that occurred among elderly people living in residential care facilities. Similarly, these critical conditions have also affected care workers employed in this sector though important variations across countries have emerged. Against such a background, this chapter investigates the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the residential care sector during the first wave of the pandemic in seven European countries, in the light of pre-existing structural (i.e. main characteristics of employment in the residential care sector) and institutional conditions (i.e. embeddedness of the residential care sector within the general structure of care regimes) predominant in each country. Our research results show the complexity of the intersection between the impact of the Covid-19 crisis and the two analytical dimensions considered. This makes it difficult to identify a unique configuration of factors behind the differentiated impact of the pandemic on the residential care sector.