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Envision, for a moment, a world in which the rapidly spreading coronavirus is mostly infecting people under the age of 50

Imagine that the death toll is highest among children and that, as of today, the United States had reported more than 104,000 confirmed cases and at least 1,700 deaths, mostly among middle schoolers

If your imagined reaction differs from your current one, then we must ask some hard questions. Most crucial: Is the reality that elders are most likely to get ill and die from COVID-19 affecting the way countries—particularly the U.S.—are responding to the pandemic?

one of the great divides of modern politics: young versus old. In Britain, age is now a better predictor of voting intention than social class. Overall, the Boomers voted for Brexit in 2016 and the Conservatives in 2017; their Millennial children voted Remain and Labour.

The debate is also about so much more than abstract disagreements over policy and government funding.

Caring for the elderly, for example, becomes wrapped up in assertions of “just deserts”—I’ve worked hard all my life and paid my taxes—and fears about money-grubbing children selling off their parents’ houses. It is also, like taxes on inheritance, a subject that prods at many people’s deep desire to pass something on to their offspring.

A major reason older people are still at risk is that vaccines can’t entirely compensate for their immune systems. A study recently published in the journal Vaccines showed that for vaccinated adults ages 60 and over, the risk of dying from COVID versus other natural causes jumped from 11 percent to 34 percent within a year of completing their primary shot series

A booster dose brings the risk back down, but other research shows that it wears off too. A booster is a basic precaution, but “not one that everyone is taking,”

Unlike younger people, most of whom fully recover from a bout with COVID, a return to baseline health is less guaranteed for older adults. In one study, 32 percent of adults over 65 were diagnosed with symptoms that lasted well beyond their COVID infection

“It’s also important to see what we, as society, could do differently, because this will not be the last untreatable virus to decimate our elders,” he said. “When we, as a society, see that it’s appropriate to warehouse our elders, and to put them in small spaces, to underpay their staff so that there are chronic staffing shortages . . . we are going to see this over and over again. We all opted for this type of environment for our elders. And as a result, this virus spread through a publicly funded nursing home . . . like wildfire.”

Without improvements, he warned, “a publicly funded nursing home is a virus’s dream.”

What is receiving considerably less attention, however, is that not everyone who is vaccinated will develop antibodies, and many of those who don’t are at high risk for the most severe consequences of Covid-19. As a kidney transplant recipient, I am one of those people.

Vaccinated people may still catch and transmit the virus, which for most people isn’t dangerous, but the situation is different for the immunocompromised. The New York-Presbyterian and Columbia University team reports that some fully vaccinated transplant patients who contracted the coronavirus required hospitalization, and one was intubated.

In 2016, more than 4 percent of the U.S. population reported being told by a health professional that they were immunocompromised in some way. While studies show some are able to develop antibodies, the future for many of us is uncertain.

The coronavirus crisis could not have been more cunningly engineered to expose Mr Johnson’s flaws. He was made prime minister not because anyone thought that he was a cool and decisive head with the leadership skills and moral seriousness required to handle the gravest public health emergency in a century.

He was put there because he was a successful representative of the entertainer branch of populist leadership that prospered in the pre-virus era. “We elected him to be a ‘good times’ prime minister,” comments one senior Tory. “His curse is to be prime minister in bad times.”

The wrong criticism of his performance is to say that he has made mistakes. Confronted with a novel disease for which the country was unprepared, any prime minister would have made errors. The correct criticism is that he has failed to learn from his mistakes and egregiously repeated them.

Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, who recently scoffed at “the notion that love, not marriage, makes a family,” has a forthcoming book titled “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.” All of these scolds typically rely on the same batch of academic studies, now compiled by economist Melissa Kearney in her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” which show that kids with two parents fare better on a variety of life outcomes than those raised by single parents, who are overwhelmingly women.

harping on people to get married from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today.

On the rare occasions that women are actually asked about their experiences with relationships, the answers are rarely what anyone wants to hear.