In Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture, just south of Tokyo, one in four residents is older than sixty-five — and that’s the youngest the population will be for a long while to come. Policy makers around the globe would do well to take notes from their response to the aging megatrend.

In the wake of more than 6.4 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide and unprecedented economic destruction, the global community has no excuse to be caught unprepared for the next pandemic. Yet right now, a devastating parallel plague is already underway and worsening. Some years, it is killing well over 1 million people, according to medical journal The Lancet.