The Limited Times

Has the health crisis put the generations back to back?

5/19/2020, 6:08:10 PM


The first victims of the virus, the elders have been at the center of the attention of a society which has agreed to idle to preserve the most fragile.

It is our children who will pay the debt, for an illness which must be remembered that the average age of death that it causes is 81 years. Traditionally, parents sacrificed themselves for children. We are doing the opposite! Morally, I don't find it satisfactory . In the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, these words by the philosopher André Comte-Sponville, 68, in an interview given in mid-April to the newspaper Le Temps , had the effect of a small bomb. "We cannot sacrifice the young and the active to save the old," said demographer Emmanuel Todd in late April in an interview with L'Express .

Read also: The Covid-19, revealing growing needs for 6 million seniors

The first victims of the virus, the elders have been at the center of the attention of a society which has agreed to idle to preserve the most fragile. Beyond the dilemma between health crisis and economic crisis, could this choice of confinement lead to a war of the generations? "Opposing young and old is a mistake," says Hervé Sauzay, president

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