And they harm all of us. Some countries responded slowly to the coronavirus threat because they deemed it a condition primarily lethal to old people “less worthy of the best efforts to contain it,” the World Health Organization’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted recently. That some of the national leaders abiding by this assessment are themselves in the highest risk group is testament to one of the fundamental truths of ageism: that it is pervasive among old people themselves in ways that threaten both personal and national health.

The news and social media have been full of similarly counterproductive messages, even cruel memes such as “Boomer Remover,” a descendant of last year’s dismissive and condescending “OK, Boomer.”

This matters in the era of Covid-19 because in a culture that persists in ignoring the last century’s huge gains in longevity and the obvious differences between young and much older adults, we are unable to address the needs of older Americans. It matters because the isolation necessary for slowing the rate of contagion will also cause irreparable harm to their health and have both short- and long-term economic effects. And it matters because when we accept the second-class citizenship of an entire category of human being, we set a precedent for treating others with the same disregard.

The effects of this isolation are being seen throughout the country. On Twitter, a young woman in Oregon described being called over to a car at her supermarket where a couple in their 80s sat scared to go inside lest they become infected; they handed her $100 to do their shopping so that they wouldn’t starve. One of my geriatrics colleagues who cares for people in assisted living facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area told me one patient had commented that his current living situation was “like being in solitary confinement and we have no idea for how long.” A photo picked up by many news outlets shows a Connecticut man holding a sign outside his wife’s nursing home window that said: “I’ve loved you 67 years and still do. Happy anniversary.”

Isolation and neglect add to a history of systematic injury. The Trump administration didn’t just eliminate the federal office of pandemic preparedness and dismiss or drive away scientists and experts at all levels of government; it also moved to decrease nursing home oversight and infection-control regulations. Meanwhile, although I could cite abundant data on the poor quality of many nursing homes and on the ubiquity of loneliness, neglect and mistreatment, and I could note that the facility in Kirkland, Wash., that responded so slowly to a lethal contagion had a top government rating, it is more compelling to simply ask: If you don’t already live in a nursing home, are you looking forward to the time when you can move into one?