Maybe. We know what language skill acquisition loss does to children, especially the poor. And now with the extreme virility of newer variants it seems impossible to prevent infection over the medium term. So we’ve probably stunted the development of a generation of kids for no benefit to them.

The extremely contagious nature of the newest strains is in many ways a direct consequence of our global failure to contain it early on before it had so many chances to mutate. (eg how we did with MERS and the original SARS)

Asymptomatic spread and a lack of clarity on whether it was even "airborne" plagued our early efforts to contain it.

That being said, the lockdown-related learning loss is also a disaster, and one that will disproportionately impact disadvantaged kids and their communities.

The only argument I'm making here is that closing schools and switching young children to "distance learning" was a bad tradeoff and a disaster. It was driven by fear, anti-science nonsense, and the concerns of large US teachers unions. The CDC in general failed, and is run by liars with contempt for the general public.

I'm not sure what we could have done once the virus entered wild mammal populations and began circulating in places with no public health infrastructure. This happened pretty early on. The Omicron variants came out of mice populations in South Africa.

It sounds like you're making a case for "a necessary or acceptable risk" which I don't really agree with but I think is a valid position. But that's very different from the "no real danger" claimed above, which again I don't think anyone has the knowledge to honestly and confidently assert right now.

Every other OECD nation went back to in person schooling pretty quickly, and mostly without masks. They didn't have catastrophic outcomes. There is to date, no known serious long term risk to children in general, but nearly a century of data about the importance of socializing with other children to childhood development. In the US we got this wrong.