Your last line is the super important point, occurred to me today as well. If we beat this thing with social distancing, idiots will say "See! There was no reason to panic!"
Social distancing, contact tracing and isolation of the sick work well, and that was almost certainly the critical portion of the response.
For example, this paper makes a solid argument that the travel ban delayed the epidemic across china by only a few days:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/05/scie...
- Lockdown in northern Italy: People ran to the south taking the virus with them. - Schools closing, folks asked to work from home in Madrid: Families drive to the coast where bars and restaurants are full.
I agree that in a place where compliance with social distance measures is high (I'm thinking South Korea, Japan), that would be enough. But that doesn't work everywhere.
You might get to the point where you need to make a choice between who you're going to accept in the hospital (younger people then get the fast lane over the elder due to potential higher amount of life years being saved). I believe its like that in Italy at this point.
If old people quarantine themselves the chances of them not getting this disease increase. I know a few elder (including loved ones) who I don't want to see passing away, so I have an interest in this.
On a different note, I also find it selfish and distasteful to feel careless about big groups of other people based on discriminatory elements such as age.
And that's not even addressing that the at-risk group isn't just the old.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES5U9YUXkAA1e7H?format=jpg&name=...
They boasted about buying now cheap tickets to fly on vacation instead of "suffering through" home office as ordered by our company.
These are educated people. Doesn't seem to save them from ignorance though, as they are on the "just a flu" train.
(You ask an annoying, but fair and important question here. We shouldn't lose our skeptical mind.)