This point is one of the worst failures of conventional wisdom about Covid, especially on the right. You could entirely ignore the deaths of the elderly, and there was a separate pandemic just of the young that was among the deadliest events in all American history.
The Covid story is even worse if you recognize that dying young deprives you of much more of your life. If you look at it in years of life lost, Americans who died at 35-44 years old lost far more years of expected life than those who died aged 85+.
Covid was a story of American carnage for working-age men and women. It just was also a story of mass death for the elderly too, and a lot of people who wanted a framing to dismiss it decided that must have meant everyone who died was going to anyway.
The screenshots are from this piece I wrote in 2022 attempting to offer an account of both of the reckonings due, to each side of the Covid debate. https://www.nationalreview.com...