Why the Coronavirus Is Especially Harmful for the Elderly

Older adults are at severe risk of Covid-19. According to recent research, people over the age of 80 are hundreds of times more likely to die from the disease than people under age 40. Part of the reason, writes Bo Stapler, MD, in Elemental, is a process doctors call “inflammaging” — the increased inflammation that occurs as people get older and their immune system ages. The prevailing thought, he writes, is “that our immune response to the virus becomes defective with increased age.”