by Karen and Erica

During this awful pandemic we have heard many times that people over 65—often called senior citizens—are particularly vulnerable and should probably never leave home again. That scares us. But is also aggravates us. Is it really necessary to scare people over 65? It is an attitude toward age that seems contrary to science.

Why, we have asked, is age itself an indication of vulnerability? The answer invariably is that older people have more underlying conditions than younger people. So age is actually not the point—rather, it is assumed that after a certain age you will inevitably have age-related illness. Just as it is assumed that being over 65 makes you a senior citizen. Age is just a marker. But is it, in 2020, a valid marker?

We were interested to read two competing op-eds, recently published in the New York Times, that took opposing views on the subject. The authors, both professors, have bet each other as to how long people now alive will live. One—Austad—-thinks people could live to the age of 150 as a result of biomedical advances. The other—Olshanksy—thinks that many diseases must be conquered to allow us to become older than about 80. Of course we favor Professor Austad’s analysis, but the most interesting part of the discussion, for us, was his discussion of geroscience, and his conclusion that if we addressed aging directly—by altering genes, modifying diets and using available drugs—we could reduce the incidence of many diseases in older people. ”Treating aging itself thus can dramatically change the mortality rates currently seen in our later years.”

That is, for us, a conceptual breakthrough. It seems to follow logically from another breakthrough about which we have previously written—the work of Linda P. Fried, the Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Her research underlies the identification of the Thirty Year Dividend—the extra years of healthy life we—especially we women—have today because of investment in public health in the 1950s.

As we approach a world in which life expectancy at birth is 76 globally and 84 in the United States, and at 65 people can expect to live another 20 years on average, we have achieved something without precedent in history: we have added a whole new stage of life to human existence of 30 extra years.

But not everyone gets it. Some people still think a person over 65 is over the hill, and should be put out to pasture—or, now, sent to her room. “Remarkably, many of our default policy assumptions are that this added stage of life is a drag in every sense of the word, with older people gobbling up disproportionate shares of our public and economic resources at the expense of younger generations.”

Dean Fried has demonstrated that these attitudes are not consistent with science, and Professor Austad takes that analysis one step further—arguing that underlying illnesses themselves can be eliminated by addressing age. Because of steps taken in the last century and being advanced now, people can become healthier at any age, and can remain healthy for many more years in 2020 than they could in 1950.

So, while we wholeheartedly support initiatives to contain and eliminate COVID-19, we do not think the cause is advanced by contending that everyone over 65 is vulnerable. That is not true now, and will be even less true as medical science continues on its upward trajectory. Repeating it will simply lead to unnecessary anxiety. We are determined to win the fight against COVID-19, but it will not be won by stereotypical thinking.