The whole reason for social distancing and #flattenthecurve is to delay mass infections long enough for the scientific/medical establishment to develop a vaccine or, failing that, effective treatments. There's an understanding among policymakers (though perhaps not in the general public) that either everyone's going to have to get it, or a vaccine's gotta be developed. The problem is that with a 2% mortality rate, "everybody's gonna get it" is 140 million deaths, the largest mass casualty event in history. This is a lot like one of those movies where an asteroid is hurtling to the earth and a bunch of random oil roughnecks need to detonate a nuke inside it - it's a hail mary, but not doing anything is not an option. The hope is that the biomedical industry can develop a vaccine, effective treatments, or at least a lot more ventilators and hospitals to blunt the impact before everyone gets it.

It's not just old people who are at risk, BTW. With medical treatment the death rate of under-40s is about 0.2%, 30x less than the ~6% of over-65s. However, young people are still hospitalized at roughly half the rate of old people; if the hospital system is overwhelmed we can expect a death rate of ~5% of young people. That's about a 10 million young people in America alone. That's why it's so important to delay the epidemic long enough to build enough hospitals and ventilators to treat everyone.