Well, I live in Sweden, the country that never locked down. Our death rate from this is depressing (and probably accurate and not inflated or underestimated), and shows that we did not manage to protect our most vulnerable elderly people at all. I believe that this is because after decades of cutting back and paring costs in that sector there was no proper plan to ensure that the elderly in care met as few people as possible and no support system so staff could ensure that they stayed healthy (for example extra economic support so they would stay home if even slightly sick, over-hauling all staff schedules to avoid temp workers etc). This needs to be properly analysed by the authorities and I hope they learn something from it, it's tragic.
However our schools did not close (except high school level and universities). There are not masses of teachers dying, there are not masses of children dying. My son plays ("ohmygod we're hanging out not pLaYInG") with friends outside pretty much every day too.
If you're interested, this is a link to the Swedish Public Health Authority's statistics page. In the center of the page are two graphs of the same sort that show, on the left, number of cases of illness in each age group (bear in mind though that we haven't managed mass testing either so these are only the laboratory confirmed cases) and on the right number of deceased in each age group.
I mean, there is a risk, but at some level we have to manage the risk.
The approach is by no means perfect, but it's also not not working, iyswim. Our big danger now is that people are beginning to relax, to use public transport more, congregate in bigger groups and so on.