The thing I find tricky to understand is why there is a view that we could have divided the population into separate groups with no contact with each other during Covid, in order to do ‘the best thing’ for each group individually.
So we believe that care homes ‘should have been kept secure’ (to avoid the huge waves of infections and death there) but that schools ‘should have remained open as normal’. Or that ‘the healthy young’ could have lived their normal lives because ‘only the elderly and vulnerable’ are harmed by Covid.
This completely misses the point about chains of transmission of infection - a school child and an elderly person can be cared for by the same adult. A teacher can be married to a care home worker. A school child may have a vulnerable parent. A hospital nurse may carry infection, via their school age child, to their vulnerable classmate.
In the height of the pandemic, what was needed was to look at society as a whole, to look at these links, to consider places and occasions where infection might be most likely to occur, and weigh up the risks as a whole. The fact that someone might not themselves be at risk is not sufficient to allow them to mix freely in a crowded environment such as a school IF as a result they hugely magnify the risk to vulnerable people in society as a whole.
We can argue about whether the government, at all times, got their judgement of ‘the best balance between the interests of different groups’ right, in the context of eg finite and stretched NHS resources. We can also discuss which, if any, countries with similar population density and crowded school estates managed to keep all schools open face to face throughout. I am not saying ‘the UK got it right’ - far from it. Just that the over-simplistic view in hindsight from our well-vaccinated post - Omicron world may not reflect the complexity of the time.