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Based on an exploratory interview study conducted in January 2021 in two long-term care homes for the older persons (EMS or EHPAD) in French-speaking Switzerland, this article seeks to grasp the way in which the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted care practices and, more broadly, community life in these institutions. From a sociological perspective attentive to the dynamics of interactions, it articulates the notion of form of life with that of test (épreuve), and addresses the protective measures ordered by the State and then taken up by the EMS according to the way in which they deploy a certain divide between the social and the vital. In so doing, the article highlights the ethical resistances that have emerged in these places of collective living where some of the most vulnerable older people reside, and the damages that the pandemic has made to what constitutes the ordinary thickness of a form of life. The five experiences that make up this test are described one after the other: caring for a collective life with the virus; feeling alive and being moved; providing for survival, protecting the vulnerable; sustaining a “livable life”; and the erosion of the form.