I did not realize that the sole metric that our society should optimize for, to the exclusion of all else is 'how many children get sick and die from COVID'.

(It's a very convenient optimization metric, though, because it requires us to do quite literally nothing.)

Lots of people argue that children aren't dying because they were more locked down. For example the person I responded to. That is wrong, children aren't dying since covid doesn't hit them very hard. Children being vectors infecting others wasn't a part of this discussion.

Children get sick, few have got sick enough to have died from it.