Covid-19 risk and older adults: Is it OK to hug your grandchildren, travel, go to church?
By July, a 102-year-old member of Dr. Adrian Cotton's family had been mostly stuck in a small room at her assisted living facility for four months — ever since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

"She finally got enough of it and said, 'I want out of jail, I'm going to go stay with some friends,'" Cotton, an internal medicine physician and chief of medical operations at Loma Linda University Health in California, told TODAY.

And that's exactly what his wife's great-aunt did last month, moving into the home of family friends for two weeks. Cotton wasn't worried about the centenarian — a woman who used to drive an hour to Los Angeles to take her girlfriends to Dodgers games until she was in her mid-90s. She was tested for coronavirus after her vacation and the result was negative.

Loma Linda is famous as a place for healthy aging and one of the "Blue Zones" where residents live extraordinarily long lives. Cotton has seen patients in their 90s come into the hospital with Covid-19 and recover.

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But this is a complicated time for people over 65, who are at highest risk for getting the severe form of the disease and dying from it.

At the start of the quarantine, the rules for this population were clear: stay at home.

Now, as doctors know more about the coronavirus and with states opening up, things are more vague. People are both tired of the quarantine and more relaxed about the rules. They're eager to catch up with family and friends they haven't seen since the spring even as Covid-19 cases continue to rise this summer.

"Probably for people our age, one of the big issues is grandchildren," said Dr. Leo Cooney Jr., a geriatric clinician at Yale Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who is over 70 and has been cautiously reuniting with his grandkids. They progressed from Zoom calls, to staying far apart in a backyard, to quick hugs while wearing masks.

"There are ways that you can get out of the house, that you can socially interact, but you have to do it carefully. To just take a plane or go to a gym or go to a resort in August of 2020 is not a good idea no matter where you are," he noted.

TODAY asked Cooney and Cotton to weigh in on some common scenarios older adults may face right now and the risks they present.

Both experts emphasized following the basic precautions: Social distancing, wearing a face covering, staying outside as much as possible when going out and avoiding large gatherings.