Age discrimination not required to open state

Dr. Faheem Younus’s argument for avoiding extended stay-at-home orders may be good, but his plan is not (“Infectious disease expert: Expanded stay-at-home orders could be risking people’s lives,” April 27). His first recommendation for reopening starts out, “Allow healthy Marylanders under the age of 60 (the least vulnerable) to restart life.” I object strenuously to the age discrimination which is unnecessary and irrational.

Vulnerability is not only a matter of age, as we have seen in too many reports of this strange disease. In the past month I have read of a nurse in her 50s and a young man of 19 who died, and a woman of 106 who recovered, as well as numerous articles about the bewilderment of professionals encountering devastating phenomena they don’t understand in supposedly less vulnerable patients. The fact that the majority of deaths have been among the elderly may be due in part to the fact that so many of them have been confined in unhealthful group facilities where responses to the disease have been grossly inadequate at best.

Most people over 60 are fully capable of recognizing when prudence and caution are needed. If the state reopens without age restrictions, they are not going to rush out to gather in dense crowds but use their own judgment and take what precautions they deem desirable which in most cases will probably still be considerable. It is impertinent to suggest they need to be managed by others with blanket restrictions and it is likely such a discriminatory proposal would generate legal action.

Katharine W. Rylaarsdam, Baltimore