The demographer Albert Esteve has imagined a parallel world, in which the coronavirus did not emerge in China and did not spread capriciously based on tourism and other businesses. On the fictional planet of Esteve, someone has gone house to house in 81 countries inoculating the virus to 10% of the random population. The results of their simulations—which take into account the age of the population and the coexistence of young and old in the same home—show that some countries were much more vulnerable than others. Some were a powder keg. “Spain had the potential to suffer greatly due to its demographic characteristics. We are very vulnerable,” summarizes Esteve, director of the Center for Demographic Studies, at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
