AAQ,
I appreciate that your all for mask wearing and social distancing, but as an individual we cannot decide to make this into a torah ruling and even compare this to the mitzvah of sukkah. At least until our Rabbis and leaders do not tell us so.
I am also sure you appreciate the fact that some communities that have extremely low vaccination and clearly disregard for social distancing and have normal minyanim and normal gatherings, have not seen any worrying increase in covid cases, just a few small scale breakthrough cases.
While I am not advocating for anything, we are still in the process of figuring this out, and we don’t have all the answers. So this observation should be taken into consideration.
Maybe it was wrong to close the schools, because the communities that had normal schools while the rest of country was being home schooled likely had the majority of kids infected (probably completely asymptomatic) with Covid, mitigating the current issue about kids being vectors (carriers) of the virus.
Also, the lack of social distancing and masking probably increased natural herd immunity in these communities, especially among the younger low risk group during the 1st wave, essentially protecting the entire community from additional widespread waves.
Im not an expert in these matters, but lets not fool ourselves making believe we have all the answers. In fact, there was so much that we held initially to be the truth only to be considered now as fiction. For example, Motrin being bad for those infected, stay away from steroids, early intubation. All of those are now considered bad medicine. But at the time, with the information at hand those seemed to be the best option.