Earlier this week, I was talking to my fabulous feminist mother and I asked her point blank. “Are you worried about getting Covid-19?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not in the target age.”

I was kind of shocked. My mom is 78 years old, but like many Baby-Boomers, she thinks she’ll be fine because she doesn’t feel old and she writes books and has all the energy of someone in her 30s. And while I applaud her, I foresee this being an enormous problem. We are living in a time of older adults feeling good, even invincible, and they are certainly healthier than their own parents were at this age.

But that’s why we may be heading into disaster. Because Boomers don’t think of themselves as “older adults.” They don’t understand that just because they feel a certain way that doesn’t mean that they won’t be the most affected by Covid-19.

Covid-19 is a pandemic which has now killed more than 5,000 people, according to the latest figures. The CDC website says that Covid-19 is most dangerous for older adults or those with preexisting conditions. (An older adult is defined as anyone over the age of 65.)

This would mean that my fabulous mother is indeed at risk from Covid-19. But here’s the problem: Being an older adult today is not the same as being an older adult 50 years ago. Just look around at the people running our government today. The average age of a sitting United States senator is 61.8. The president is 73. Nancy Pelosi is 79. The two remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are 77 and 78, respectively. These people are literally running America (or are eager to do so) and so they don’t really believe us when we tell them that they are in the crosshairs of Covid-19.

Trump, in particular, seems to be in absolute denial. For weeks he’s been saying that Covid-19 is no big deal. On February 28, Trump said that coronavirus will “disappear” like a “miracle." In March, he told reporters on Capitol Hill that coronavirus “will go away.” At various points he has speculated that warm weather would kill the virus and stop its spread and also erroneously claimed that the numbers would soon be “going very substantially down, not up,” Meanwhile, back in late February, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief economic advisor said, “We have contained this.” None of those these things ended up being true. Instead the virus has mushroomed and spread.