Even if most people who die are pretty old, the illness also affects the working age population negatively.
I didn't miss that - they're on the graph in the lower right. Just not very many - about six of 4500 in a working age population get the severe form and need to be in an ICU.
Your statement lacks any quantitative part by the way -
any illness affects the working age population negatively.
Who die are old and who needs old people anyway? Old people are humans too. Old people are parents. Grandparents. Teachers. People who are often important for other people. People who often contribute to their families, for example by helping raising children. Letting them die seven years earlier of COVID-19 on the average is a big loss.
THAT is the point.
So - if THAT is the point - isn't that a bit callous to people who happen to die of... a traffic accident, losing, say, 50 years of life? Why wasn't every effort made to save their life - say by hard speed limits? Harsh punishments for speeding? Why is their life somehow the price of the freedom to drive fast? Or the people who get severely injured and, say, lose a leg? Or what of the people who die of influenza? Are 25.000 dead not worth a lockdown? What of the people who die of a heart attack - isn't
their life worth every effort - at least a much more dense net of qualified emergency response? Specialized units in every hospital rather than only a few? On-call specialists 24/7 instead of only during the day? Why is their life worth a smaller health insurance bill for everyone else?
What makes a potential death by the Coronavirus worth basically any sacrifice by society in your book while the same society shrugs off death by any other cause as 'it just happens'?
If we take the argument 'we need to go to any length to prevent people from dying' seriously (in actual fact, human history has shown clearly that it's not so much preventing but delaying...) - then why are - much cheaper - measures
not passed which would have saved and would continue to save many lifes?
Isn't there something fundamentally wrong with the idea 'let's spend a few millions so that this person doesn't die of the Coronavirus, but let's
not invest a few ten thousand to prevent him dying of a heart attack'?
It's a kind of poor man's moral philosophy to say 'we need to do everything' - the simple fact is that we as society simply can't. And it isn't fair focusing on one potential cause of death - it would be fair (at least in my humble opinion) to give every risk the same attention proportional to its severity and the same proportional effort to prevent it.
And in order to do that, we need to be able to assess the actual risk from different dangers. And for that, we need to look at numbers and statistics - which you seem to dislike so much.
Note that I've never been doing anything else here but collect numbers to try to realistically assess risks (in contrast to what the news media often seems to do, i.e. focusing on the most shocking and spectacular findings). That I find difficult enough to do properly - to turn that into a normative statement what a society *should* do ... is a question on a wholly different level which I'm not even attempting to tackle.
So you're quite out of line when you try to put 'sacrifice the elderly' into my mouth - this does not logically follow from the observation that the risk for young people is much smaller than usually assumed (and in fact, I stated that I had not said that right above your post).