I have some savings. Should I live on that rather than claim Social Security now?

This is a very personal decision that depends greatly on your circumstances. Maintaining an emergency fund is always important, and never more so than during times of economic volatility. But people with very substantial savings can draw down safely to cover living expenses while delaying their claim.

The loss of earned income means you will be in a lower tax bracket, and rates are at historically low levels under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

“There’s no better time to take money out of a 401(k) or I.R.A. than when your income is relatively low and you have a lower marginal tax rate,” Mr. Finke said.

A delay of just a few years can be very beneficial. A 62-year-old with a full retirement age benefit of $1,500 would increase her likely lifetime benefits by more than $100,000 by waiting until that point to file, according to a projection by William Meyer, a co-founder of Social Security Solutions, which offers software aimed at helping retirees make optimal claiming decisions. Mr. Meyer’s calculation assumes that our retiree lives to 90 and that Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment is 2 percent each year.

But the pandemic has added a new dimension to claiming decisions for most retirees, the retirement researcher Dirk Cotton said. Since most Americans have modest savings, if any, many of them will need to hang on to what they have.

“I know that I can either get Social Security income now, or shift some of it to the future if I think I might need it more later than I do today,” he said. “But the question now is whether the pandemic has changed our thinking enough about the future to affect that decision, and the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”

For example, the future economic security of adult children might favor an early Social Security claim over drawing down savings now, Mr. Cotton argued.