OPINION | Covid-19: young and old, the two faces of the pandemic

Editor’s note: Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor. His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America. Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International. The opinions expressed here are solely his.

(CNN Spanish) – The AARP says, citing data from the CDC, that 95% of the dead in the United States are over 50 years of age. They refer to covid-19, of course. The AARP is the largest retired organization in the US They are not Democrats or Republicans. They defend the interests of the old. It’s a lobby formidable that all politicians court and fear. I remember getting ads for canes and diapers for adults as soon as I turned 60. At the time, it seemed eccentric to me. This was 18 years ago. (Today, propaganda is not so eccentric).

At this time, a large part of the people infected and hospitalized due to the coronavirus are young people who have not been vaccinated. Why haven’t they been vaccinated? For reasons a great variety of reasons. (I have read delusional and unfounded attacks on Freemasonry, on China, on the State that is going to place a chip to control society to put it at the service of pharmaceutical companies, Bill Gates and George Soros). Because they think the virus is not that dangerous. (Although at first it was not, now we see young people in ICUs for the dangerous delta variant). According to these data, the percentage of deaths under the age of 18 is less than 0.2%. And it increases very little with each decade of life, until reaching the age of 50. From 18 to 29 years old, 0.5% die; from 30 to 39, 1.3%. From 40 to 49 years old 3.1% die. But from 50 upwards the deaths skyrocket until reaching 95% of the deaths.

Why does this phenomenon happen? Because the immune system deteriorates over the years and loses its effectiveness. Faced with covid-19, a 10 or 12-year-old boy is not the same as an elderly man of 70 or 80. With age, suffering increases, essentially the result of the defenselessness of the bodies of the elderly. Heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes 1 and 2, and severe lung diseases, such as cystic fibrosis or asthma. To these diseases are added other lifestyle diseases such as obesity and smoking.

Sometimes the dangerousness is reversed and more attacking children and young adults. Until 1955, poliomyelitis, also called “infantile paralysis,” was common. Symptoms were non-existent or vague: headache, nausea, vomiting, fever. As in the case of covid -19, there were asymptomatic people, who had the disease, but did not suffer from it and could infect others. That landscape began to change as soon as the polio vaccine was perfected, but even such a terrible virus was not without ideological controversy.

According to Dr. Elmer Huerta, a brilliant consultant for CNN en Español, in the year that the polio vaccine was distributed, in 1955, the lady who had to defend it, since she was in charge of Health in the Ike Eisenhower government, said that society should not be vaccinated because that vaccine “was socialized medicine.” It is true that we were at a critical moment in the Cold War, but from there to qualify the vaccine as “communist” there is a long way.