The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public health emergency. Older adults have been at substantially greater risk of hospitalization, intensive care unit admission and death due to COVID-19. As of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths in the US occurred in people over the age of 65. Converging evidence from around the world suggests that age is the greatest risk factor for severe COVID-19 illness and for the experience of adverse health outcomes. Therefore, effectively communicating health-related risk information requires tailoring interventions to the needs of older adults. Using a new informational intervention with a nationally representative sample of 546 US residents, we found that older adults reported increased perceived risk of COVID-19 transmission after imagining a personalized scenario with social consequences. Although older adults tended to forget numerical information over time, the personalized simulations elicited increases in perceived risk that persisted over a 1–3 week delay. Overall, our results bear broad implications for communicating information about health risks to older adults and suggest new strategies to combat annual influenza outbreaks.