[woodruffw]

> It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.

This is the aforementioned pivot. Nobody made this claim.

The claim is that, early in the pandemic, unknowns about the dangers of COVID to children were one among many sufficient conditions for closing schools. Once we learned what we currently know, that condition lost its sufficiency. But that didn't change the sufficiency of the other conditions (read: community transmission, teacher health, &c.), which remain.

[civilized]

Putting away the continued nonsense about subtle pivots - it's not even the same claimed pivot, and I explained from my very first sentence that the early uncertainty could make closing schools understandable, if only for a couple months - it is extremely untrue that the other conditions were widely considered sufficient.

That's why TFA was written. Tons of people still deeply disagree with this risk calculus.