My toddler with asthma is going back to school vaccinated. That's reason to be grateful.

Like most kids, my daughter doesn't like shots. So getting my 4-year-old her COVID-19 vaccine in August, before school started back up, wasn't what she (or I) would consider fun.

But after bribing her with candy and a few dollars (one wouldn't do the trick), she jumped into the car, pigtails bouncing, happy to hurry up and get it over with so she could pick out her post-vaccine candy.

On the way to get the vaccine, we talked about what was about to happen.

Question: Would it hurt?

Answer: Just a little.

Would she get a lollipop after?

Yes.

Does this mean she still has to wear a mask at school?

For the moment, yes.

These are the kind of questions I was asked, and the answers I gave, on my two-hour hunt in and around the Denver metro area last week to find the toddler version of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.

It was time well spent.

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Grateful after so much worrying

"We're all gonna die." That thought ran through my head somewhat obsessively 2 1/2 years ago when reports of what was to become the worst pandemic in 100 years began to dominate the news cycle.

It was February of 2020 and like many people I know, I was terrified when the pandemic first hit. My family was also uniquely exposed because my partner is a doctor.

We live in a three-bedroom apartment, so isolating was pretty impossible, although we did our best to stay safe. I tried to manage my anxiety while continuing to work from home and home-school my kids, but I could barely keep it together some days.

I worried a lot about my partner getting ill. But I was even more terrified for my then 3-year-old daughter who inherited her asthma from her father. If doctors were dying from the virus, what would happen to my asthmatic baby?

It was almost too much to think about.

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Thank you, science

There are so many things that a parent has to worry about these days: from school shootings to cyberbullying. Dying from COVID, however, is no longer one of them for my family. My daughter who has viral-induced asthma is going back to school fully vaccinated against the virus. And while I can't keep her from getting infected with COVID, her chances of dying from it are very small now.

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And that is something I am deeply grateful for.

It's true that the coronavirus spared most children. But the occasional report of kids getting multisymptom organ failure from COVID was enough to leave any parent up at night biting their nails.

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Back to school with some sense of peace

For me it was a bit worse: My daughter spent the first three years of her life doing nebulizations (and screaming as I tried to hold the mask over her face), taking steroids, sometimes going to the hospital for asthma attacks, and then 18 months of very expensive allergy shots to try to help make her less hyper-reactive to respiratory illness and give her lungs more of a fighting chance when she did get sick.

I realize this isn't the end of the road for the coronavirus. It might never be gone, and we will still get sick from it. This means that there will likely be annual vaccines, like we get for influenza. But after more than 1 million COVID deaths in the United States – 1,401 of them children up to 18 – and about 200,000 children who lost a caregiver during the pandemic, getting a prick in the arm once a year hardly feels like a sacrifice.

As my daughters return to school this year, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the teachers, day care staff, grocery store workers, cleaning and maintenance people who kept institutions sanitary and running, and medical professionals like my partner who showed up every day to do his job regardless of the risks to himself or his family.

I hope we never have to deal with anything similar again in our lifetimes.

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Carli Pierson, a New York licensed attorney, is an opinion writer with USA TODAY, and a member of the USA TODAY Editorial Board. Follow her on Twitter: @CarliPiersonEsq

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Back to school and vaccinated after so much loss due to COVID