> Europe apparently operated a lot less draconian wrt schools, never really closed down & things worked out pretty well.
I certainly would've preferred this; here we kept the bars open, but closed the schools. Both are middle grounds, I preferred Europe's prioritization. At the time these decisions were being made, some folks talked about R0 being like a budget - you want it under one, and each mitigation gets you part of the way there. I was disappointed to see the US prioritize economy over kids; much of the world made the opposite choice, and provided more income supports to keep kids in school.
> You don't need a middle ground for the least vulnerable age-range for covid.
This would be a great point if kids lived alone, with no vulnerable folks at home.
> it's irrecoverable because you never get back lost time
People recover from lost time frequently. If your teacher is sick and you have a substitute teacher for a couple days, that time gets made up. There's summer school, enrichment programs, etc. Very little of what kids learn in school has to be learned in one specific set of months; there's a pretty large range in exact ages within a single grade, even.
It'll be years, maybe decades before we know how plastic child development is in this regard. Right now, there are massive unknowns in evaluating all of this.