A utilitarian/socialist/communist/godless society would want anyone incapable of working again to be dead. The key, if my baseless conspiracy theory is true, is how easy is it to make a virus that is very contagious and not very deadly - this is the way to kill very old seniors a few months early and, to the godless, every day you can get a senior to die early is money in the bank.
It truly is amazing the way the virus avoids infants and can hurt seniors.
LOL, almost as if it was designed that way. . .
Being serious, past really bad pandemics killed young because of the cytokine storm. Older folks had been exposed to all kinds of things over their lives, but the young hadn't. So the already-sick older folks would die, but also you would hear stories of young folks being healthy in the morning and dead in the evening.
I wonder how much of Covid not causing cytokine storms in kids is because it is so closely related to the common cold, and therefore they have already built up standard immunity.
But if my memory is correct, the larger death rates for the young in the past happened during the second and third pass through the population. I guess we will see.