It strikes me as a kind of mawkish attempt to rebut the comments of two doctors about weighing the lives and well-being of younger people more heavily than that of older people when forced to make public policy choices. I'm not sure why these particular doctors need rebutting; the more extreme of them, Ezekiel Emanuel, made some comments seven years ago and a year and a half ago that are being responded to; the other, John Lee, published an essay on Unherd recently, which is a fairly fringe site I think? Looking at Wikipedia it's British, so maybe it's not so fringe in the the UK? But The Hedgehog Review and Alan Jacobs, the author of this piece are both American. At any rate, neither of them are prominent or influential. And truth be told, it seems like Emanuel - who seems to have said some pretty unpleasant things and is the primary target here - was roped in as a way to tarnish Lee's more recent, more relevant, more even-handed comments.
The upshot is, old people can do meaningful things, like go on vacation and have a fun time, too! ...which is so banal as to not really be worth saying. Of course they can! They just...can do a lot less of it in the remainder of their lives, on average, across the entirety of the population; and they've had more opportunity to do so already compared to the young. Under normal circumstances this doesn't really matter. But when circumstances are forcing a choice...well. Jacobs acknowledges that maybe we do have to make some kind of brutal calculations, but doesn't really suggest how; he just pleads sentimentally. Which isn't surprising, because if you're ever actually willing to make that kind of brutal calculation, it's hard to imagine a moral calculus that says "killing young people with their lives ahead of them so the elderly can get a few more golden years in" is the right way to go. And there's the kicker, in the conclusion: "it would be good if some of our public-health experts would find a way to incorporate those ineffable but vital things into their calculations", as though any public-health experts anywhere seem to be willing to make the trade-off he seems to be accusing them of making.
And - admittedly this is more of an emotional reaction - the paragraph about how "['Covidtide'] has offered opportunities for renewed connection and a deepening of affection" feels, to me, borderline offensive in light of everything "Covidtide" (ugh) has wrought: the deaths from the disease itself, the mental health disaster of isolation, the poverty from economic shutdown, the debt we'll spend decades paying off (at the cost to social services), abuse victims trapped in their homes with their abusers...I guess it's just an attempt to look for a silver lining in a bad situation, but looking all that in the face and saying, "ah, but it's so nice that I got to spend a bit of extra time with my grandkids!" smells faintly repulsive.