A Look Back at 2020: Progress Towards the Treatment of Aging as a Medical Condition

While I suspect that COVID-19 will feature prominently in most retrospectives on 2020, I'll say only a little on it. The data on mortality by year end, if taken at face value, continues to suggest that the outcome will fall at the higher end of the early estimates of a pandemic three to six times worse than a bad influenza year, ten times worse than a normal influenza year. The people who die are near entirely the old, the co-morbid, and the immunocompromised. They die because they are suffering the damage and dysfunction of aging. Yet the societal conversation and the actions of policy makers ignore this. There is little discussion outside the research community on greater efforts to restore immune function in the old, or indeed about the reality of the age-related mortality of COVID-19 at all. All infections are treated as equally dangerous; the media dwells extensively upon the very few young victims; the whole of society is closed, at staggering cost, when the risk to most of society is little worse than yearly influenza, and certainly less than that of than driving to work. There was a better approach to this, a cloistering in safety for only the vulnerable, and a continuing willful blindness to that better approach. A cynic might argue that those factions among the powers that be that are ever seeking after greater control, greater surveillance, greater submission, greater conformance, are in the driver's seat these days. This issue with COVID-19 and aging...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Of Interest Source Type: blogs