Seventy is the new f ifty but the virus doesn’t care

IT’S hardly a surprise that large tranches of the over-70s are bristling at the idea that they should cocoon as if they were on their last legs. What exactly, they may well ask, has a pensioner who does 20,000 steps a day, swims in the Forty Foot and has a Spanish bolthole for the winter got in common with a decrepit asthmatic who only leaves their nursing home to go to funerals?

Since turning 50, today’s retirees have been encouraged to believe 70 is the new 50: a lucrative industry spanning fitness and plastic surgery to hair transplants and dentistry has sprung from the idea that youth and beauty are less biological than material. It’s as if youth and health are consumer goods that can be picked up like a trendy shirt or even a new hip.

If 70-somethings look to their famous contemporaries and beyond, they don’t see armies of white-haired geriatrics pushing frames. They see Joan Collins, 86, Nancy Pelosi, 80, Jane Fonda, 82, below, a parade of glamazons enjoying Life’s Third Act and to hell with the bill for wigs, veneers and bionic body parts.

ON THE male front they see the wizened Bernie Eccelstone, a man who, let’s hope, has seen better days in the looks department but, given how he’s about to become a father again aged 89, hasn’t entirely lost his virility. ‘I don’t see there’s any difference between being 89 and 29. You’ve got the same problems I suppose, it’s alright,’ says good old Bernie.

Doubtless mere striplings like Paul McCartney who is only 77, Rod Stewart, 75, and Mick Jagger, 76, agree.

As the planet tries to control the Covid-19 outbreak, it is also older people it looks to for scientific breakthroughs and the cool voice of authority. In the US Anthony Fauci, 79, the chief immunologist, is a counterbalance to 73-year-old Trump’s style of crazy. Fauci works 20-hour days during the pandemic and squeezes in a seven-mile run at lunchtime. The US’s health chief Francis Collins turns 70 next week.

It seems ironic that in the drive to flatten the curve some of our so-called senior citizens are worked to the bone while the rest are condemned to a term of house arrest that could sound patronisingly as if we were wrapping them up in cotton wool for their own good.

We all know that insects spin their own cocoons of silky threads from which they emerge when the time is right, as beautiful butterflies in the case of caterpillars. But our cycle of life is somewhat different than the butterfly’s and its irreversibility has been one of the crushing realisations of this health crisis. Thanks to our advanced society, we can have rude health and fitness in old age, well-preserved looks and a fighting spirit that refuses to go gentle into the night. But inside we are not so different from the generations that went before us. Covid-19 exposes modern society’s well-kept secret, which is that it’s not just the female reproductive system that is ruled by a biological clock. Our lungs and heart, our vital internal organs are also on a one-way journey and at 70 they have endured such wear and tear that they are not as up to fighting Covid-19 as in our youth.

DR Catherine Motherway, President of the Intensive Care Society, says this pandemic is unusual in that it may be the case that age, regardless of fitness or frailty, is the sole indicator of mortality. In Italy the average age of Covid deaths is 79.4 years. Here, at the moment, it is 82 years. We may be as strong as an ox, or an intellectual and scientific powerhouse, but if we are over 70 then the virus wants us.

Cocooning may be an unfortunate term but the over-70s have the wisdom of age and the best advice is to embrace rather than rail against it. It will guarantee them many more years of good health and happiness. And yes, many of the outward signs of youth.

➤➤THE redeployment of teachers for contact tracing during the emergency is an excellent idea given the desire of many staff to carry out some public duties in return for their steady wages. But for everyone’s sake let’s hope that the national effort doesn’t extend beyond May. Battling Covid-19 may be exhausting our national resources but it’s a socially distant walk in the park compared to the military campaign that will be required to get teachers to work during their summer holidays.

RONAN KEATING marked the arrival of his fifth child, a daughter named Coco Knox, with a heartwarming picture of him, Storm and a blurry-looking newborn from the hospital bed. Either Ronan needs a better photographer on his publicity team or he’s anticipating a lucrative reveal with Hello magazine.