Ms. Jopp, twenty years ago there were almost 3,000 people in Germany who had reached the age of a hundred years or more.

In 2010 there were already 13 198. And how does it look today?

The latest data was just published a few weeks ago: there were exactly 20,465 men and women aged at least one hundred years in Germany.

Hard to believe!

Does that make Germany an exception?

On the contrary.

Between 2006 and 2011, the number of people aged “hundred plus” in Europe doubled.

According to the United Nations, around half a million men and women were living in this age group in 2020.

How has the corona pandemic changed these numbers?

This virus is of course a great danger, especially for very old people. For example, data from Italy show that more very old people died there than is normally seen during the first wave of the pandemic. In Germany, on the other hand, the number of centenarians has even increased recently, despite the pandemic: Compared to the previous year, the most recent survey counted 3523 more people who were at least a hundred years old. This is certainly also due to the fact that new jubilees have joined. Perhaps centenarians were also particularly protected, through their way of life or the support of relatives and the measures that were taken against the pandemic. Whether there was still an increased mortality rate among centenarians due to Covid-19 remains to be clarified.What is certain, however, is that even the coronavirus was unable to slow the sharp increase in the number of centenarians - which gives an impression of the enormous demographic development in this population group.

How did the centenarians cope with the restrictions imposed by the pandemic?

Unfortunately, we do not yet have any information on this question for Germany. However, as part of our current SWISS100 study in Switzerland, we were able to conduct telephone interviews with fifty centenarians and sixty relatives. It was especially difficult for those centenarians who were still quite active before the pandemic. This group suffered enormously from the fact that all leisure activities in homes and communities were canceled due to the risk of infection and close family members were not allowed to visit the nursing homes for months. Some felt very isolated. The relatives reported that the centenarians' health had deteriorated significantly over the years, also because measures such as physiotherapy were canceled in addition to activities.The corona masks are an underestimated challenge for the very old: Most very old people no longer hear well and are dependent on including the facial expressions of the speakers. Masks make communication difficult for them.

One would expect that most centenarians would not get by without professional support.

But one of your studies has shown that more than half of the people in Germany at this old age still live at home.

Amazing isn't it?

And studies from the USA, for example from New York, have shown that it is up to 70 percent there.

In Switzerland, the situation seems to be a little different: the majority of the “generation hundred plus” apparently lives in nursing homes, according to preliminary estimates around 65 percent.

Data from an earlier study also suggest that the very old in Switzerland tend to be more frail than in other countries.

We still want to find out why.