Intergenerational contacts and Covid-19 spread: Omnipresent grannies or bowling together?

Many scientists are currently contributing research on SARS-CoV2, with social scientists focusing on demographic and behavioral aspects when it comes to the diffusion of the virus. Recent publications include valid contributions about the importance of population’s demographic composition to understand country-differences in fatalities, and some speculations about the origins of different pace and patterns of diffusion. Among them the idea that intergenerational contacts would contribute to explain the fast spread and high fatality among the elderly population in some countries. We argument that in order to contribute to the scientific knowledge speculation is not enough and acknowledge that in the absence of solid, comparable data it is difficult to bring these ideas to an empirical test. Further, we present a simulation experiment shedding serious doubts on the importance of intergenerational contacts to spread the virus on the elderly population but underlining, instead, the importance of the high connectedness within the elderly population. That southern Europeans are not bowling alone seems to be more relevant to explain high diffusion among elderly than their contact to their (grand-)children.