Can an 80-Year-Old Do Covid?

A Cautionary Look Back at the Latest Pandemic

By W Goodwin

Like a high tide or a storm surge, the viral flood of Covid-19 and the thrashing it gave Lynn and me finally receded. After wasting fifteen days of our lives, the disease faded from our bodies and we can now look back with more understanding than we had in early 2020.

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Remember those bizarrely quiet days at the beginning of spring in 2020? Like many other people, my partner Lynn and I howled at sunset in honor of our stalwart healthcare warriors. We all felt embattled as Covid rampaged through the world. Lynn (somewhat younger than myself) and I (b. 1943) reacted to the pandemic by learning all we could about what was initially called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. We soon embarked on an energetic study to learn everything we could about Covid much as we did a few years ago when we first considered doing psilocybin (“Can a 75-Year-Old Do Psychedelics” featured in Medium in 2019).

Assuming the submicroscopic enemy would not ignore us, we binge-watched the news and serial-Googled the internet to learn what we could about this phantom-like, ever-mutating, madly-propagating, new disease. We soon discovered the questions about Covid exceeded the answers. An apparently significant number of people were questioning the trustworthiness of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and infectious disease experts.