The hospitalization numbers show the majority of them were under 1 year of age, who would not be attending school. This according to your link [2]

>> Among 95 children aged <1 year with known hospitalization status, 59 (62%) were hospitalized, including five who were admitted to an ICU. The percentage of patients hospitalized among those aged 1–17 years was lower (estimated range = 4.1%–14%)

And of course the number of children infected would be much lower than "all 74 million".

Your math is wrong. First, there are 56M students in the US (5-18 year olds, pretty much). Second, while you quoted the % of cases that belong to children, that is the wrong stat. You want the number of kids that would ever get COVID, which is probably all of them, although there is evidence that 20-50% of people have some sort of resistance. So, for worse case estimates, if all students get covid, then 56M * 0.018 = about 1M kids hospitalized. However, CDC also has evidence that there are 5-10x the number of cases in general out there. So if it is 10x, then it is 100,000 kids hospitalized because the hospitalization rate is commensurately lower. Still not a good number.

If we look at mortality, it is better. The current estimate for IFR in kids is about 1 in 300,000. That gives about 220 estimated deaths if every school age kid gets Covid. Cars kill more kids per year driving to school.

This is all horrendously tough to decide on, but we need to use the best data we can and understand the dangers and comparisons to other dangers.

Finally, kids are going to spread it anyway, so I think kids getting it is really a non-issue, except for the very vulnerable.

Staff/teachers are another concern. An even worse concern is people at kids' homes. That's the really tough part.

You need the Infection Fatality rate for mortality.

1.7% while schools are closed.

The numbers in the CDC article are up until just April 2, 2020. Two weeks prior (incubation period) puts the latest case data in mid March, prior to when the lockdown started to be rolled out.

Granted, the situation has become a lot worse since then. It's still a good glance at how the virus spread before any measures were put in place. Especially for relative figures of how COVID behaves differently across age.

I just woke up when I wrote this. The math makes no sense. Please disregard this stupid comment.

But those are tunnel vision stats only considering one variable.

It's the parents that will be at risk.

There are plenty of examples of distance learning working well. Assuming it is a failure seems willfully blind to me.

This spring we rushed into something unexpected. We've had time to improve. But it seems that instead of focusing on improvements people are focused on their agenda.

Kids don't learn like adults. They can't replace teachers and peers with computers, not permanently.