People put a lot of weight in early studies from countries that didn’t see outbreaks in schools. My problem with those studies has been: 1) Community spread in those areas was very low. 2) Kids were/are not being tested at anywhere near the same rate as adults. 3) We really have no idea whether there are long term effects in asymptomatic individuals.

Regarding both 2 and 3, kids seem to be largely asymptomatic. That would explain the lower testing rates. People are generally not going to go have their kid swabbed if there’s no apparent reason to do so. But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects, it seems pretty cavalier to just assume kids won’t. Hopefully they don’t, but we really don’t know.

This type of thinking often gets dismissed as “alarmist”, however a bit of alarm (and an abundance of caution) over a rapidly spreading novel virus is warranted.

(This is my armchair analysis. I’m not a health expert.)