It’s probably not worth the electrons to say it, because this problem ceased to be a rational question some time ago:
That 1.6% of the population over 85 years of age accounts for just over 30% of the deaths, according to CDC publications. A good percentage of those are a result of poor public policy.
Of course this virus has created a spike in deaths. But who, in reality, do those deaths represent? There certainly has been no spike deaths of the population less than 20 years of age, and it’s probably not significant for the population less than 40 years.
The problem here is that our experts have allowed people to believe that all of us are under equal threat. And they have wasted their energy designing policies on that basis, rather than policies to protect the most vulnerable.
The point you’re making has been made for some other diseases. You are somewhat trying to quantify years of life lost. At first glance that makes pretty good sense. If only the very old at the ones dying then we’re not losing that many years of society life.
But that will never fly in the context of legality. If you started to walk down that path you would then have to declare degrees of murder to vary by the age of the victim. A criminal that shoots an elderly person versus a criminal who shoots a younger person . . . we would have to vary their sentence on conviction because the crimes would not be equivalent.
Society is not going to go down that path. Murder is murder.