Guest editorial

This journal, seeking to support and promote quality in the ageing experience the world over, has had to engage with the COVID-19 pandemic. This year began with an approaching shadow, a highly infectious virus, with little known about its effects. Now, for older people, the services working with older people and researchers with older people in many countries have followed months of intense dealing with high rates of infection. The authors of the collection this issue has assembled were able to consider the implications for their particular field and offer us a range of perspectives, analysis and even recommendations as now in the North infection rates which declined over the summer months are rapidly rising again. All of our contributors remind us that communities have a fund of relationships, practices and knowledge which may be evenmore valuable to draw on and reframe for looking forward to a “new normal” which older people can share in to sustain health and well-being in many circumstances. Older people may also have a wealth of experience of building resilience for wider society to draw on and reframe.