Table 2.

Biomedical and socio-economic status of older people presented in the examined news articles (N = 568)

	Category	Subcategory	Percentage (%)a
Biomedical	Age	60–69	11.5
		70–79	10.1
		80 +	25.3
		Unspecified	62.9
	Gender	Male	20.1
		Female	19.4
		Unspecified	69.3
	Health conditions	COVID-19 patient	31.8
		Non-COVID-19 patients with chronic conditions	20.7
		Frail (physically and psychologically)	30.5
		Physically and mentally disabled	19.4
		Healthy	3.9
		Unspecified	33.7
Socio-economic	Source of income	Pension	1.5
		Social benefits (means-tested, age-related, etc.);	2.8
		Paid work	0.5
		Unspecified	96.1
	Living arrangements	Living in aged-care facilities	25.7
		Living in private dwellings	17.1
		Living alone or with spouse only	15.5
		Unspecified	53.6
	Having adult child(ren) or not	Having adult child(ren)	21.0
		Childless	3.5
		Unspecified	76.3
	Health literacy	High	2.4
		Low	2.2
		Unspecified	95.4
	Digital literacy	High	1.5
		Low	5.6
		Unspecified	93.1

^aThe percentage of each category might add up to over 100%, as we adopted a nonexclusive coding strategy that allowed each news article to be coded into multiple categories