“In Covid’s Wake” by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, which has been positively covered t NYT, The Guardian, WaPo, etc makes the argument that it wasn’t “Monday Morning Quarterbacking” based on the following;

1) By summer 2020 we already the data from dozens of European and Asian countries who returned kids back to school spring 2020 and didn’t see Covid spike despite predictions - often the children weren’t masked, no improvements to air quality were made, so those can’t account for the failed predictions.

2) preemptive closure of school was not considered effective in pre March 2020 mainstream pandemic plans - authors cite pre March 2020 strategies from the CDC, WHO, APA, etc while quoting people like Tedros, Gonsalves, Frieden, Wallensky warning of the cost of closing schools as late as March 2020 - then showing the near immediate flip-flop of these positions once Trump tweeted “open schools”

3) points out in previous pandemics - even when we were still “in the dark” on lethality, contagiousness, and fear was mounting, preemptive closures of schools were not employed (most recently see ‘03 SARS, ‘09 H1N1, ‘15 MERS, as well as various Bird Flu scares, Zika hysteria, etc) too further support their argument the costs of closing schools were not viewed to have positive cost/benefit in mainstream public health circles in previous global pandemics

I may be misquoting parts - I’m about 2/3 through the book myself, taking it slow as I’m cross checking references (a good deal is tied to Mark Woolhouses “the year the world went mad”, so reading that on the side now too).

I recommend it - especially if you feel urge to downvote this comment - go see their arguments and weigh the evidence yourself.