"2 problems … with segregating the elderly and letting others return to work. … lot of young people would die. hospital system is going to be overwhelmed … more young people get COVID-19 the less realistic protecting a subset of the population becomes."https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/the-internal-contradictions-of-segregating-the-elderly.html …
People will still die, young and old, but we know from both the work of expert modelers and empirically from managing past pandemics (and countries managing current one the longest) this is the best, if imperfect, approach.