The article discusses the features of health-saving practices of older people who have suffered COVID‑19 and live in rural areas. The research focuses on everyday practices and their social projections in the context of the life of older people in such areas. The factors influencing the formation of various health-saving strategies of the olders are described. The most dangerous for all health-saving strategies of the older after COVID‑19 are: infrastructural difficulties, problems associated with the development of rural medicine, lacking support, communications in the local community. The researchers focus on the specific experiences of the older people and how they describe in narratives changing practices and requests for medical help or for the help from the local community after the COVID‑19. The empirical basis of the study is semi-structured interviews collected in three villages in the southeast of the Republic of Karelia with an infrastructure deficit and infrastructure development problems. The strategies outlined in the study form a kind of continuum from the transition to self-medication practices and the use of self-medication by older people, which differ depending on what kind of help older people resorted to, starting from the help of the local community and ending with medical care available in rural areas.