Everybody past their 30s has a pre-existing condition— getting old. Our systems don’t work as well because our DNA is becoming increasingly unstable— senescence. When one system starts to horribly malfunction a doctor is called in to certify that that system is really fucked up— diagnosis But its irrational to think 70 year olds with no clinical heart disease have healthy hearts. Nobody that age has a healthy heart. It’s degrees of fucked-upness. We have been trained to believe there is this binary condition/no condition state of health in people. But all systems get increasingly dysfunctional as we age. We just haven’t reached level of precision in diagnostics to specify how dysfunctional a person’s cardio, immune, hepatic, renal, gastro-intestinal systems all are at a given poinnt in their life. Health is not binary. This mentality— “oh see coronavirus is only dangerous if you have a chronic condition => only people of weak moral fiber have pre-existing conditions, unles they’re like 75 and then it was their time to go anyway” — is not a great way to look at this disease. Young people are safe from this disease. Old people aren’t. The problem is aging. You can’t prevent it. But people in their 50s are occassionally dying of this disease because they are old. Most people are diagnosed with a pre-existing condition by 60. It doesn’t mean we should just accept people dying in their 50s ( or more likely 60s through 80s) when they may have years or decades to live yet. Especially when we know there are effective preventions and cures. Those of you that haven’t been paying attention because covid is “not real” or “just the flu”, there are cheap prophylactic drugs you can give old people to prevent covid infection. My old person is taking one. The cure *exists*. They are just trying to prevent people from knowing about it.