What Can We Learn about Aging and COVID-19 by Studying Mortality?

Abstract

Abstract: Promising ideas and directions for further research into biology of aging are discussed using analysis of the age-related kinetics of organisms’ mortality. It is shown that the traditional evolutionary theory explaining aging by decreasing force of natural selection with age is not consistent with the data on age-related mortality kinetics. The hypothesis of multistage destruction of organisms with age, including the rate-limiting stage of transition to a state of non-specific vulnerability (“non-survivor”), is discussed. It is found that the effect of the COVID-19 coronavirus infection on mortality is not additive (as it was the case with the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918), but multiplicative (proportional) for ages over 65 years.