I don't mean to make light of it.

I was there in the weeds, too, from early May 2020 on. You don't have a profile, but most here know that I am also an educator (I predate Janet, so I've been here a while). I will guess that we were back in school before you were--we went back in early May 2020, and were onsite through the start of July.

We did a really great job of tracking cases throughout the pandemic, and we had no evidence of any transmission in the school (student to student or student to teacher), in large part because we had really strict protocols (which were miserable, but that's another story).Those protocols included mandatory N95/FFP2 masks for everyone, classroom windows and doors to be wide open for 5 minutes every 15 minutes, and testing everyone in the building at least three times per week, on site, first thing in the morning.

We were also really lucky in that teachers who were deemed high risk due to age or other factors were allowed to re-structure their jobs to work from home until vaccines were widely available.

I obviously don't think that we should have just thrown the doors open in May 2020 and let 'er rip. But man, the amount of damage that we did to kids by keeping them away from each other was *massive*. Massive. I still see it, every day.