arbitrary

You are not reading my comments. The closures did not reduce deaths/infections by enough to justify having them, that is the argument.

I feel like you only read half my comment each time.

You will always reach a point of diminishing marginal returns with measures taken, and you have to evaluate the impact of the measure against it's effectiveness.

The argument is that school closures likely did not contribute sufficiently to justify their extent of implementation, meaning you probably would have wanted a few more people dying to avoid the shortfalls in children's education and socialisation that you have now. The ends, in retrospective, arguably did not justify the means.

I mean, comparing countries with it's peers is what you should do. I could also have taken Argentina, Bulgaria, or Russia, but at the end you'll see that Germany did fairly well.

I think the question is somewhere how much death we accept against the impact of avoiding it. In this case, as I said before, there seems increasingly the opinion that school closures as a measure did not have the impact that justified its extent of use.

They don't say that. They said the extent of closures was inappropriate for the severity of the pandemic and the role of schools.

And Germany did quite well during COVID, per capita deaths are far lower than, for example, in the US, UK, Italy, or France.

Not sure about other countries, but at least in Europe we had quite a few comments, including by health officials, that the school closures should not have been done and upheld to the extent that they were.

And I agree, the impact on learning and children's mental health was not justified by the real or potential dangers of the pandemic imho

Edit: One comment from the German Health Minister here, describing prolonged school closures as a mistake