It really shouldn’t if you’re an educated person who is following what scientific authorities are saying. The science here is still uncertain, but leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it. See: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski...
> At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notable, yet mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools… Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
> In the realm of science and public-health policy outside the U.S., the implications of these particular findings are not exactly controversial. Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms.
If it turns out they are useful, wearing them will have been a good idea.
If it turns out that they weren't useful, what harm has been caused?
(I'm aware that there are people out there who think wearing masks for a year or two will scar children for life, but for the most part I don't think those people are arguing in good faith. The biggest harm I see is to children with hearing problems who are prevented from lip reading.)
This is as an article by medical professors at USC and Stanford:
> At the same time, the long-term harm to kids from masking is potentially enormous. Masking is a psychological stressor for children and disrupts learning. Covering the lower half of the face of both teacher and pupil reduces the ability to communicate. In particular, children lose the experience of mimicking expressions, an essential tool of nonverbal communication. Positive emotions such as laughing and smiling become less recognizable, and negative emotions get amplified. Bonding between teachers and students takes a hit. Overall, it is likely that masking exacerbates the chances that a child will experience anxiety and depression, which are already at pandemic levels themselves.
I don’t know if you have young children, but facial expressions are a huge part of communication. My kids are constantly looking at my face to for “is this okay” signals. Kids learn to look at facial expressions of peers to understand what they’re thinking and feeling. There’s just tons and tons of research on this.
Masks for kids isn’t like masks for adults, where you can say “well even if they don’t work there’s no harm.” What we don’t have is research showing that wearing masks has persistent negative effects on kids, but based on what we do know that’s a real possible harm that has to be weighed against the possible benefits of masking.
Nobody's expecting you to wear masks at home.
But, even with masks on at school, your kids have plenty of unmasked time at home.
This is one reason why, after 18 months of masking, there is still no data supporting your argument.
It isn’t my job to prove anything. Y’all want to force my daughter to wear a mask to attend a public school you better have a hell of a lot of evidence and data to back it up. You need to address each and every criticism and support it with solid research conducted over years of time.
None of that exists and all criticism no matter how valid is met with gaslighting, being called a right wing fool, and name calling. Which says to me there is no solid justification for kids wearing masks besides partisan politics and tribalism.
Y’all are signing my kid up to be your unconsenting laboratory experiment, which is highly unethical and straight up immoral.
I’m not the one pushing kids to forcefully wear masks. You are. It’s disgusting and one of the worst things we’ve done. Almost no European country masks their kids. A handful of blue states are basically alone in forcing kids to wear masks at school. Which really underscores what is really going on, and it ain’t “science”.
Asking someone to prove a negative when they indicate there is no positive evidence pointing towards the assertion you're making isn't a 'checkmate' retort.
Negatives are much harder to prove than positives. You aren't being gaslit.
Maybe take a step back and calm down. Saying things like:
>I’m not the one pushing kids to forcefully wear masks. You are. It’s disgusting and one of the worst things we’ve done.
Is probably too emotionally charged to result in a good dialog, if that's what you're looking for.
The entire burden of proof is on you people trying to make this massive deviation from normal. Not me. You have to support your arguments with more than telling me I’m emotional or blowing it out of proportion. Because I have a right to be massively emotional and pissed off. I am fully within my rights to defend my daughter from what I perceive as a great harm. And y’all have no right to tell me how to feel.
Seriously. It’s abuse. You mask people are super abusive. Giant bullies using your loud voices, mockery and name calling to drown out anybody with valid criticisms.
So to the “force kids to wear masks” people here, put up or shut up. Show me proof it won’t fuck my daughter up and show me proof it is actually going to benefit her. And if you can’t provide that proof than go bugger off, I’ll yell at you, the administration and my dumbass governor and his unelected health “experts”. My daughter is more important than any of y’all’s unfounded mandates.
Because near as I can tell there is absolutely no benefit for the actual child wearing a mask. It’s all for giving the appearance of protecting adults, who have a choice to be fully vaccinated. Which is so immoral and so wrong, again, I’ll refrain from stating exactly what I think of the people pushing for it.
No one is gaslighting you, nor is asking you to discuss things in a civil manner 'abuse'.
If you assume everyone discussing this with you are doing so in bad faith despite their best efforts to be reasonable, you don't really keep the door open for any new perspectives.
We made dramatic, massive social changes virtually overnight and continued them for more than 1.6 years. Why is it so hard to imagine that smart, well intentioned people might have a difference of opinion from the narrative we’ve all had shoved down our throats? Eh?
Just magically every single person who is smart and well meaning obviously has to support masks, lockdowns, school closures, and everything else. Otherwise they are a dumb stupid misinformed “them”.
It’s absolutely absurd thinking. The arguments made to force this nonsense on people represent some of the worst attributes of humanity. Gaslighting. Abusive. Bullying. Shaming. Narcissistic. Unscientific and completely intellectually dishonest.
Seriously. Knock it off. Y’all should be ashamed of yourself.
Not at all, but that doesn't mean everyone who disagrees is discussing the matter in a civil manner.
I've only posted to bring attention to a flaw in your logic, as well as to comment on the emotionally hostile manner in which you've been replying.
Just take a step back and calm down; people don't seem to agree with your positions and you're taking it as a personal attack. Engage with people in good faith and discussions will be more fruitful and less emotionally taxing.
Teachers have been vaccinated. Parents have been vaccinated. Kids aren’t at risk. Why this obsession with reducing cases if we took the sting out of covid?
Kids need to be children. They aren’t human shields for adults. Adults are expect to sacrifice for kids, not the other way around. Kids deserve their one and only childhood. They don’t deserve to be treated like disease vectors that need to be muzzled to make frightened parents and educators feel safe. Double so when all those adults can get a free, highly effective vaccine.
Making them mandatory is even worse. The state has no right to force my kid to wear a mask at school in order to have an education. Parents should be making that call for their own kid.
Honestly back then I would have felt the same thing that I do now: that I am happy to wear a mask so I and/or my parents/grandparents or other people around me don't die of a completely preventable virus, and that people who refuse to wear masks are idiots for not doing the most simple, effortless thing to help prevent the needless spread of the virus.
Wearing a mask doesn't steal anyone's childhood. Does wearing glasses steal your childhood? How about braces? We do A LOT of uncomfortable things in our life for our health and future. Wearing a mask is one of those things, due to the ongoing pandemic.
I mean, added bonus, I haven't had a single cold or flu or anything like that in over a year and a half. I'm guessing you (and anyone reading this) can probably say the same, if you strictly masked up, used hand sanitizer, etc. Yeah I've been sick for other reasons, but not a single time have I been sick from something transmitted by another person. First time in my decades of life that I've gone this long without any transmissible illness.
And it isn't my job to provide proof or data. I'm the critic. I'm the one that wants things to operate as normal. All the burden of proof is upon those who wish to force my child to wear a mask her entire school day 5 days a week. Thus far, all I hear is "OMG CASES", "kids are resilient", and a bunch of weak rationalizations. Nobody has made a case who or what we are protecting. Nobody has provided an end game. Nobody has proven it won't harm kids. Nobody has even asked kids. It's disgusting, really.
It's like how I look both ways before turning onto or crossing a one-way. Sure, it probably doesn't help much, but there's a chance that it could save my life and another driver's.
[0]: https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/14,21994,420,873.html
Also, they had 1.6 years to build infrastructure to deal with this. That was the entire damn point of this in the first place. "Flatten the curve for two weeks to make sure healthcare systems can handle the load" There is literally zero excuse for society to suffer because no capacity was added. Zero.
You cannot even blame staffing shortages... they could have thrown truckloads of money at doctors and nurses to get them onboard. It would have still been cheaper and more effective than the nonsense we are doing now.
In short, yeah it sucks hospitals might be "full" but that ain't societies fault and we shouldn't be punished for it.
My anecdotal experience via my SO who is an ICU nurse is that what you've read is not accurate. In the ICU I'm familiar with they do not have fewer beds available due to the covid protocols. The protocols do make their job more difficult and time consuming, but they have more beds than ever. Still, they're at capacity across our state due to an extreme influx of severe covid cases since delta made its way here over the past 6 weeks. Previous to that this particular ICU was ~20% covid, 60% capacity. Now it is ~90% covid, 110% capacity. This is not just because they tested positive - these are people on various levels of oxygen. They are intubating covid patients in the ER because there's no room anywhere else.
I'm in arguably the reddest state in the US where most people share your views. I'm not sure how you can say apathy toward spreading a contagious virus is not societies "fault".
PS: they are throwing truckloads of money at doctors and nurses, luckily for us.
Moralizing spreading an airborne highly contagious respiratory virus is one of the most toxic, dangerous things we’ve done. It’s absurd. It’s a virus. It does what it does. People catch it. It’s nobody’s fault.
The people living in your red state are perfectly fine holding their beliefs.
And to be clear, the majority of the conservatives I know personally are vaccinated and wear masks, by virtue of their belief in personal responsibility.
Stealing their childhood away, really? It's an article of clothing. My kid objects to wearing pants a whole lot more than he objects to wearing a mask. He still needs to wear pants.
Come to think of it, maybe that's why this is such a huge deal. People have come to think of clothing as a marker of your tribe, and not wearing the expected clothing as social deviancy. That's why wearing a hajib is so triggering for so many Americans, or why guys wearing skirts is an affront against nature (but strangely not in Scotland!), or why folks get killed over wearing gang colors, or why I desperately wanted a denim jacket when I was in 1st grade in the 80s.
And if that's the case, sure, you can have your tribe and I'll have mine, and my kid will wear a mask because that's what the people around him do, and yours won't because that's what the people around her do, and then maybe my tribe will still have ICU units available and yours won't. Okay. But I can assure you that kids in Singapore or Taiwan or now California, where mask-wearing is just accepted, grow up just fine.
It's an article of clothing which covers of the faces, the facial expressions, the smiles of all their friends and teachers. A typical modern preschool for two working parents is what, 50 hours a week? You are sending your child to a place where they are spending the bulk of their waking hours, the bulk of their socialization, and not allowing them to see smiles. I can still remember the faces of my preschool friends, I am still friends with some. If I had never been able to match smiles with them, would it still be the same? And even if they are fine in the long run, you are still making a year of their life (or more? what is the end game exactly?) significantly worse. It boggles my mind that smart people like yourself are so blase about this.
and then maybe my tribe will still have ICU units available and yours won't.
Masking kids at schools isn't going to have anything to do with this. Denmark has done just fine keeping schools open with no masking ( https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/denmark-schools-covid-19-pande... ). If ICU's are within two or three doublings of filling up, then shut down the gyms and concerts and indoor dining for adults. If all such things are open, as I believe they are in California, then protecting ICU units is clearly not an imminent concern.
Okay. But I can assure you that kids in Singapore or Taiwan or now California, where mask-wearing is just accepted, grow up just fine.
What? Until coronavirus hit, there has never been a society that kept it's children masked among children from other families at all times. No kid has "grown up" under such conditions.
I find forcing kids to wear masks at school so morally bankrupt I am at a loss for words. And all I get from the people who push it is rationalization and gaslighting.
I have a right to object to my daughter wearing a mask at school. You have no right to force that on me and my family.
Nor could I wear things that showed shoulders, among a slew of other things. I wasn't allowed to take a same-sex love interest to proms, nor anyone from another school (and it didn't matter that they lived in the same neighborhood). Blue hair? Go home until you fix it. We were told that the homecoming "powder puff" game was their legal girls football.
Heck, we had people watch us enter toilet stalls in elementary school to 'make sure' we peed during break.
These things happen all the time for both children and adults. Some were just stupid rules and some really freaking unfair, but most didn't ruin childhoods. And yet, folks are asking to wear masks to protect others because we think it helps is somehow ruining childhoods?
I gotta say, I just don't understand.
It’s honestly abusive. How dare the government force my child to wear a mask at school against my objections.
Kids don’t need masks. End of story.
I really wish that was true! Sadly in the USA the amount of "vaccine hesitancy" remains unbelievably high.
As the article this discussion is about… covid is here forever. Time to accept it and move the hell on.
I'm vaccinated. I can still catch it - I'm much more unlikely to end up in hospital, but it's still an unpleasant illness to have, with a small chance of long-term complications that are not at all well understood.
And if I do catch it I can still spread it to others, who may not be vaccinated.
I very much care about not killing someone else by spreading Covid to them, even if they deliberately chose not to get the vaccine. I'm furious with them (and with the information sources they consumed that lead them to that decision) but I absolutely don't want to contribute to their suffering or death.
Yes, you can still catch it regardless what we do with NPIs. Stop living in fear.
It’s son intellectually dishonest to downvote people who express valid criticism. It’s pure tribalism… which is what is just about 40% for all our actions the last 1.6 years.
I am of a certain population that is more succeptable, and I just accept that there are people who would welcome my death from covid if it would save them from the slightest inconvenience.
I admire you for making reasonable arguments, you have more patience than me by far.
I think it's fair to demand that they change their way of living to prevent more deaths - 645,000 and counting just in the USA.
If we weren't living in a sea of unvaccinated people this conversation would be a lot easier.
You say the vaccine doesn't stop you from catching or spreading the virus, it just stops you from getting as badly sick. If that's the case then why do you care whether others are vaccinated or not? If it doesn't change the chances of them passing it on to you, and just changes how sick they'll get, then surely it doesn't make any difference to you?
Where are they saying that?
The effects of COVID complications aren't somehow magically isolated to the patient. Good luck to anyone who's young, healthy, and COVID-vaccinated, but has a bike or car accident, gives birth in a hospital, falls down some stairs, or otherwise requires inpatient care.
Remember the endlessly repeated mantra to "flatten the curve" from circa March 2020? The "curve" refers to ICU occupancy. Max that out and suddenly the effects of COVID spill beyond just sickening and killing its direct victims to complicating your health system.
The justification for kids wearing masks is so paper thin with so little attention paid to what emotional and development effects it has on the kids… it boggles my mind. Supporting kids in masks is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
And to the people downvoting me and gaslighting me… you are part of the problem. I have a right to feel the way I do, which is reason enough to never, ever force parents to mask their kids in order to get public education. It should be the parents choice, period.
You might think the public health benefits outweigh this concern, but it's disingenuous imo to just assert that there are no conceivable negative effects for a two year old having their first social experiences.
If masks are ineffective, wearing them amounts to theatrics/fiction.
If that fiction creates a false sense of safety, it can encourage people to take risks like interacting in closer proximity than they would otherwise.
I have no knowledge or expertise on if masks are effective nor have any children, this is just an observation of what seems like an obvious potential harm.
A counter-argument says that wearing a physical thing can act as a constant reminder of covid, causing people to act more responsibly.
Back on the harms side again, there's a possibility that teaching kids "just do this and don't ask questions" can have negative consequences. Again, the counter argument of letting them ask questions and carefully explaining what we do and don't know can be a positive.
Don't worry. The schools teach that with or without masks.
Socializing in masks is massively inferior. It sucks talking to other people and not being able to read facial expressions or to see smiles. Right now American health officials are asking children to an spend the majority of their waking hours for an entire year of their lives (or more??) around friends and teachers without that essential human experience of seeing smiles. That is harm in an of itself. Even if the kids bounce back, and you can't find a developmental difference in any statistic, that year of their life, a year they will never get back, will still have been a year of being deprived of essential human connection.
>. The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.
I'm not sure how 21% lower is considered "not statistically significant", in trying to suppress the spread, ANYTHING > 0% is helpful. Full stop.
Other stand out qualifiers from same report
>This finding might be attributed to higher effectiveness of masks among adults, who are at higher risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection but might also result from differences in mask-wearing behavior among students in schools with optional requirements. Mask use requirements were limited in this sample;
>The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations.
> * First, many COVID-19 cases were self-reported by staff members and parents or guardians, and prevention strategies reported by administrators or nurses might not reflect day-to-day activities or represent all school classrooms, and *did not include an assessment of compliance* (e.g., mask use).
>* Second, the study had limited power to detect lower incidence for potentially effective, but less frequently implemented strategies, such as air filtration and purification systems; only 16 schools reported implementing this ventilation improvement.
> * Third, the response rate was low (11.6%), and some participating schools had missing information about ventilation improvements. However, incidence per 500 students was similar between participating (3.08 cases) and nonparticipating (2.90 cases) schools, suggesting any systematic bias might be low.
>* Finally, the data from this cross-sectional study cannot be used to infer causal relationships.
Basically was relying on self reporting. If a student contracted and was asymptomatic, not shown here, etc.
Statistical significance has a specific meaning in the context of hypothesis testing. It is a measure of likelihood that the observed result occurred due to a real difference between groups (rather than random chance).
In their own words in that section, by the incident rate ratio it is statistically significant, even after having been adjusted for county level 7 day incidence.
You can try and figure it out on page 4 of the cdc report, it does not appear to be a null hypothesis test.
This is not a rebuttal.
If you establish a policy, and people do not follow the policy, that's on you, not on the people. You don't get to compare your intervention against an ideal world and claim that "it would have worked, if only for those darned humans!"
> Basically was relying on self reporting. If a student contracted and was asymptomatic, not shown here, etc.
A great many of the pro-mask papers in 2020 that claimed to "prove" that masks work started from self-reported data (the infamous "hairdressers" CDC report comes to mind...if a customer was asymptomatic, they were ignored; there was no control, so it's impossible to know what would have happened otherwise; etc.) The standards for "proof" across the pandemic have been dismally low, and tribalism and politics have supplanted science.
The difference here is that we actually have examples from across the globe where kids weren't masked in schools, and no matter how you look at it, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. If we're going to be skeptical (we should!) let's be skeptical of every claim, and demand proof of effectiveness for our medical interventions before imposing them across all of human society.
Of course you'd want data on how people actually take them, because to make decisions you'd like to know if the result means "prescribing antibiotics just doesn't work" or "we need to figure out how to make sure people actually take the prescribed antibiotics effectively"
We can know that antibiotics work, but still fail spectacularly when used improperly. It's important to test both.
New York Magazine is an “anti-vax site?”
https://nymag.com/author/david-zweig/
7 articles about kids/scool/covid in last year, and one "asking the question" if vaccine is causing a dangerous heart condition in young men.
1) Is your government adopting a comprehensives and realistic plan to achieve zero covid? (Such a policy must include 100% international travel shut-down, zero exceptions. If there are exceptions, your government does not have a zero covid policy.)
2) Is ICU or hospital usage approaching capacity in your area?
If the answer to those questions is both "no" (as it is in my jurisdiction which is requiring school kids to mask) then your statement is not true. A 21% lower incident rate is not helpful at all, everyone will still all get exposed to covid eventually.
It's the older kids (who could have received the vaccine but opted out) who will have more "adult-like" patterns of transmission and should be more of a concern (not for their own health, really, but they might infect their elderly or infirmed unvaccinated relatives). One would expect masking to help prevent spread from these people.
But of course... these kids and their families likely already self-select and associate closesly with other anti-vaxers outside of school to begin with, so school seems like the least of their worries. At a certain point you kind of have to ask whether it's worth trying to protect people from themselves.
Unfortunately, since this is also a political issue, erring on the side of caution with mask requirements and being wrong generates more mistrust amongst the older people who have opted out of the vaccine (i.e. those already distrustful of the CDC and at risk of serious illness just have one more reason to dig in and ignore the advice to get vaccinated).
It's possible that such mask mandates for young children may prove harmful because they further entrench anti-vax sentiment (even if is ultimately proven that they have marginal benefits in reducing spread).
This is a fascinating and complicated issue indeed...
Being treated like a toxic disease vector for two years surely has direct health downsides. Not learning to read faces surely has direct health downsides. Breathing god knows what those masks are made of every day surely has health downsides.
And it isn’t even my job to prove any of that. People that want to force kids to wear masks at school need to prove those aren’t something to worry about. They can’t just shrug they crap off and say “yeah well covid”. We are well beyond being able to simply use covid as an excuse to enact some restriction. Prove kids need masks and prove they won’t suffer long or even short term effects from wearing masks all day. Then and only then can you even dream of forcing kids to wear masks.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
"Due to the circulating and highly contagious Delta variant, CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status."
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-...
Also, the very study NYMag talks about still recommends: "Because universal and correct use of masks can reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission (6) and is a relatively low-cost and easily implemented strategy, findings in this report suggest universal and correct mask use is an important COVID-19 prevention strategy in schools as part of a multicomponent approach."
Unfortunately, given that 1910s America and 2020s America both had significant (and in my mind, unwarranted) resistance to wearing face masks; I would not be surprised if "wear a mask if you feel sick" fails to make it into common understanding in America a second time.
This same line of argument was used to question climate change for decades and to support the argument that we should not take any aggressive measures to avoid it.
There's a good chance wearing masks in schools makes the community safer from serious illness. And the risk in wearing masks if they prove to be useless is...what exactly? That masks are a little uncomfortable?
"surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr's country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: "I don't believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn't believe in it at all." This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them."[1]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859145
[1] - http://brooklynbooktalk.blogspot.com/2010/02/its-ideology-st...
Except we're talking about Zizek! This is not Michel Foucault ("Everything I say is just a toolbox, you can use what you like, discard what you don't"). He does not share your rather postmodern outlook on discourse and language, if he did, if his work was meant to accede to any notion of "Oh, words and statements are free-floating, unbound to their context, meaning is indeterminate, there are only different perspectives", etc, his whole platform would fall apart; he intends the opposite of what you're talking about with his speech. He literally defines the work that he does as partisan without ambiguity. There are pages spent in his books and multiple reminders given at his in-person lectures on this point that anything such is an objection to his platform.
It's either fidelity to his meaning, which, to be clear, is not some smarmy, one-off that misapplies his example to make a silly point about not continuing to wear masks (which, by the way, is a perfectly quantifiable question rather than a 'merely ideological' one), or the information conveyed means nothing at all. You either get that he deploys examples like these, and he has a billion over the course of work (it just so happened this one had language useful to grandparent's intended meaning), to illustrate his interpretation of commodity fetishism, the basis for his critique of ideology, or you've rendered all of his meaning bankrupt. So, yes, in his case, its either/or, and that's by design!
I have noticed that wealthy, educated, conservatives (for tax benefits) work hard to justify and provide some vaguely scientific and logical grounding to all kinds of weird conservative talking points. This might be by punching hard at some corner of the liberal/scientific consensus on an issue that is not quite well developed or the audience lacks full detail on. This equalizes both liberal and conservative positions as some what unscientific, while the reality is quite opposite. You will never find rayiner attack conservative talking points, only liberal ones.
You think you are in a scientific discussion, but you are actually participating in a political one.
As to your climate change example—here, the US is again the odd one out. Other developed countries are not masking toddlers, like the CDC recommends.
One could argue that an increased sample size would yield a statistically significant result, and on the flip side another could argue that the effect size would be minimal if you need a larger sample size.
The rebuke, of course, is that even one extra case could kill a loved one that the kid would spread disease on to.
Personally, perhaps reframing the argument that one should wear a mask at school so that they shouldn't have to wear one at home would be a more compelling argument, but I suspect many would disagree..
It was a study of a single month in Georgia before Delta. Aside from the narrowness of the inputs I highly doubt school policy and ground truth were aligned.
That study is not enough to be driving policy.
Most I've seen cited by mask proponents either don't use control groups (and thus can't really distinguish btwn other factors that correlate with mask wearing) or are laboratory tests just testing what % of particles are blocked by masks--which ignores almost every relevant question about mask mandates and relies on suspect theoretical models about how covid actually transmits between people.
I'm mystified why people on both sides are so up in arms about masks, but nobody gives one shit about uncontroversal and more effective mitigation techniques like air filtration and circulation.
An infected kid in classroom without proper air circulation could fill the classroom with enough virus to cause a super spreader event--mask or no-cotton/surgical mask.
The HVAC is continuously circulating air from the time it is on until after school when it turns off. There is some time before school and maybe 20min after school when it is on.
They have settled on only pulling air from the outside instead of recycling the warm or cool air in the room.
And having some kind of agreement on the merv rating of the filters. It may be merv 7(but I'm not sure.)
How much would it cost to retrofit a bunch of schools with this stuff?
Ideally you'd do both. Have better air circulation, and institute masks when the regional caseload goes above a certain threshold.
Even things like a box fan in a window are probably significantly more effective than scooby doo masks.
That's fine year-round in the south and southwest. Not so much in the rest of the country though.
Those are some wildly different standards. You can convince yourself of anything if you assume it’s correct and raise the bar high enough for counter evidence.
Also it sickens me that people downvote your valid concerns. Kids need facial expressions. They need to hear and see each other to learn. I don’t know why that is so controversial.
Yes, the emergency order for vaccines is generally for the higher risk population. But using a not very broadly tested vaccine that was given an emergency order first in kids doesn't seem like a good idea I guess.
Covid is extremely dangerous in kids. Long covid in kids isn't something I would ever want to expose my kids to if I had kids. If I had kids I would want them to wear a mask. I don't want to get covid from them if they happen to be a vector. I don't want them to develop a full-blown case. I don't want them to get it and then infect their mother or their friends or me or their teacher. I don't want anyone to get covid.
I've been reading all of your replies and you are an very emotional parent and I respect that and I understand that.
Kids might need facial expressions but kids 100% do need to be healthy and they aren't as resilient as you have said.
Okay, so your child gets covid isn't vaccinated and you end up finding out when they are in their mid-20s that they are developing some sort of a brain disorder that was brought on by long covid that we are completely unaware of because we don't know what's going to happen with this.
This is what's wrong with a lot of these short-sighted arguments is that... I might be afraid of covid and I might want zero covid but that is because I have the imagination to envision what could end up happening. and it's not far fetched it's not fear tactics it's not gaslighting.
While we know that kids need certain things for their developing brains, positive stimulus visual things and all of that... I don't know how you're not more afraid or more concerned about the unknowns about this virus.
Now I'm going to get a little opinionated here and it might be a little jab and I apologize for being rude... Are you sure that your actually not just worked up about this because you have a job you need your kids to go someplace during the day you're stressed about other parts of your life just crap like that?
Like for me personally, I'm disabled I stay at home all day I go out maybe once a week to get groceries and I double mask and I've been vaccinated since April 20th with Pfizer. Before this pandemic I didn't go anywhere.
I might be a little bit maladjusted but I'm not going to be rolling the dice on a virus that could potentially affect me my entire life when the life that I'm already living right now already has problems and I don't need people who are all "think of the children" acting short-sighted about all of this and putting people like me at risk putting people at risk putting themselves at risk.
I wish people would take this more seriously. Yeah we could have an entire year or two of no social encounters or deprived extroverts but think long-term on how we could have a whole slice of humanity that's getting this virus that is basically just messing up how their DNA is going to unfold how all of their proteins are going to unfold basically turning into a whole new research sector.
We have all of the knowledge and the ways to avoid all of this but we have people that just give up and accept that oh we're all going to get it so just buck up old chap.
No it's not. Death rates are less than 1 in 50,000. Death and hospitalization rates are similar to the dangers of the flu or RSV or riding in a car. It's a 100X less dangerous than owning a pool. It's the type of risk we have to be able to live with. And as for long covid, I don't have the study on hand, but there was a study where there was no difference months later in symptoms like fatigue or runny nose in kids that had covid versus did not have covid.
Okay, so your child gets covid isn't vaccinated and you end up finding out when they are in their mid-20s that they are developing some sort of a brain disorder that was brought on by long covid that we are completely unaware of because we don't know what's going to happen with this.
Or maybe they get vaccinated but the vaccine causes some prion disease that does not show up for 10 years. Or maybe a new mutant strain causes ADE in the vaccinated. Life is full of dangerous, speculative unknowns unknowns. But worrying about this kind of speculative, zero-evidence risks is the route to hypochondria.
I don't want anyone to get covid....Yeah we could have an entire year or two of no social encounters or deprived extroverts but think long-term on how we could have a whole slice of humanity that's getting this virus that is basically just messing up how their DNA is going to unfold how all of their proteins are going to unfold basically turning into a whole new research sector.
Based on current U.S. government policy, why is it going to just be a year or two? It's already been a year and a half. What is going to change to make covid magically go away? It's not going away, covid is endemic. You either will have to isolate and wear P100 masks for the rest of your life, or you will get exposed to covid eventually.
It isn’t my job to prove it isn't necessary. I’m the one that needs to be convinced, not the other way around. Y’all are the ones trying to force this, not me.
If it's full then risking developmental issues for your child should probably be a less important to you than risking a highly contagious illness with the complications that entails (complications include death, permanent cognitive, neurological, respiratory and cardiovascular damage).
Ideally every responsible* parent could choose how they want to manage the risk for their child, but that's not always practical. With limited daycare and schooling facilities, there's a strong push to follow the more ~conservative~ (cautious) approaches. And this is at it should be. As they say "Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my face", so to should your freedom to choose the level of risk you are comfortable with be limited by the freedom for others to choose their level of risk.
*A responsible parent considers the welfare of the child first and foremost, not using children as tools to make points or demonstrate a commitment to a particular ideology or to otherwise serve their own interests.
Kids aren't at risk. We have more than a year and a half of data to support this.
> A responsible parent considers the welfare of the child first and foremost, not using children as tools to make points or demonstrate a commitment to a particular ideology or to otherwise serve their own interests.
Correct. And I'd argue almost everybody in favor of forcing kids to wear masks at school forgot this.
It already has.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/13/us/dallas-county-no-pediatric...
Well, the Delta variant seems to be changing that.
The problem is that we're dealing with "if it save even one child's life it's worth it" (for any "it") reasoning, which is impossible to argue against.
"Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective."
No! If you cannot find a statistically significant benefit, perhaps your experiment design is flawed. Perhaps your sample size is too small. Perhaps you have too many confounders. But you cannot conclude the measures are not effective!
It gets better! Read the article. It says:
"COVID-19 incidence was 37% lower in schools that required teachers and staff members to use masks and 39% lower in schools that improved ventilation. Ventilation strategies associated with lower school incidence included dilution methods alone (35% lower incidence) or in combination with filtration methods (48% lower incidence)."
In other words, the study actually found many significant interventions in schools, among which masks. Unbelievably bad reporting from Intelligencer.
You’re misreading the article. He’s not saying they’re not effective. He’s saying that a high-powered study couldn’t prove them effective, which is the same thing you’re saying.
I'm frankly surprised that Zweig made such an embarrassingly simple public mistake that any statistician could have pointed out to him had he bothered to ask. His readers might not have that kind of access, but he certainly could get this answered in five minutes.
> It’s also important to underline that just because the Georgia study did not find a statistically significant benefit doesn’t mean that a larger, more statistically powerful study might not find one, said Hoeg, the epidemiologist. But since this study had 90,000 students, then the question becomes: If you need 500,000 or 1 million people to find a benefit, how marginal is that benefit?
You seem to be misreading his conclusion. He’s not saying “masking children doesn’t work.” His point is that the practice carries significant potential downsides for children, and the best real-world study we have failed to provide affirmative support that those are outweighed by statistically significant reductions in COVID transmission.
It’s the same thing the FDA does—if your drug fails to show statistically significant efficacy in testing that means you don’t get approval.
> if your drug fails to show statistically significant efficacy in testing that means you don’t get approval.
He doesn't make that point, but that one is also rather silly. If all of our evidence suggests mask effectiveness among elementary school students (some by mechanism, some by simulation, and some by evaluating mask policies on other groups), including the study he pointed to, the correct decision is to require masks for elementary school students. The harms are negligible, and the benefits for reducing community spread are large. The risk for approving an ineffective drug is far larger.
Elsewhere, you made the point that we don't know if masks should be required for toddlers. That I agree with, but that isn't a point that Zweig has made.
What is absolutely undisputed is that the primary mechanism for covid spread is airborne out of the nose and mouth.
The science is uncertain but leaning towards masking children at schools being worth it. The fact that a study that included mask intervention in Georgia schools showed a double digit percent reduction in community transmission but was underpowered to be statistically significant by itself should not cause us to update beliefs very much, let alone update them in the direction of the null hypothesis, let alone update them all the way to the null hypothesis as Zweig has done, given that our priors are informed by CERN simulations, mechanistic experiments, and adult transmission studies that demonstrate effectiveness. That just demonstrates Zweig's poor understanding of statistics terminology.
We now know what it takes to protect a person from COVID in an environment where they are likely to be exposed to significant virus concentrations; unfortunately, getting kids to scrub up like COVID ward nurses is probably not realistic.
Of course, the problem is, and always has been with COVID, that my common sense is different from yours and vice versa...
It doesn't really boggle my mind, it's just that the conclusions it suggests about fellow Americans are really hard to swallow. There is a lot of political polarization in the US and cranking through the implications and reasons for ostensibly pro-COVID policies and attitudes is really disheartening. It's a schism that isn't healed easily.
If anything, an impersonal virus, an implacable, impossible-to-anthropomorphize, zero-upside health hazard could have easily been something for the entire world to unite against. Instead, we got more and deeper division and louder and more extreme and more destructive arguments. And we lost a lot of people and maimed even more. And the reason that couldn't happen: Money. The economy. Me. Freedumbs!
COVID exposed people's real priorities and objectives and showed how craven and myopic our political leaders really are.
TLDR: To get the sort of protection people imagine that cloth masks provide, you would need to be wearing an n95 mask, tightly fitted to your face so no air leaks in through the sides.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...
It doesn't have to personally protect you at high effectiveness from getting infected to reduce spread at a population level.
Even a 50% reduction in spread is huge in a population. Maybe we aren't getting that with masks, but it's not a binary "you are protected"/"you are not protected" problem.
>Needless to say, masking is political hot button beyond anything I've ever seen in public health.
At the same time i think we've all done a disservice to the public.
When you actually look at face cloth coverings, they actually only have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out.
Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.
I've been really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking can do or not do.
On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.
The bottom line though is by telling people that in fact just putting a face cloth covering on is going to protect you is simply not true.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...
Cloth masks are nowhere near good enough protection to allow children too young to be vaccinated to return to school.
I'm just asking if we have info on population spread effects for masks / no masks.
"Masks won't protect you" isn't an answer to that question. I don't wear a mask when requested by local guidelines or businesses as some kind of guarantee that I don't get COVID.
And yes, having kids not all go to school and then return to their families on a daily basis would probably have a much bigger affect on community spread. But if we can't get political will for masks or vaccinations then I don't know where we're going to find it for another round of kids staying home.
The answer to the question is that cloth masks are effective against viruses with a droplet based spread, but not against a fully airborne virus.
Note that cloth masks almost completely did away with last year's Flu season, while we were right in the middle of a huge Covid surge.
NEW YORK (AP) — February is usually the peak of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals packed with suffering patients. But not this year.
Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record,” according to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
https://apnews.com/article/flu-has-disappeared-us-pandemic-2...
https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/zero-f...
A 50% reduction and we still all get covid. It is actually binary -- either we have a realistic and obtainable plan for zero-covid (which we do not) or everyone gets exposed to covid eventually.
A 50% reduction in spread might be helpful in certain areas where the hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed (in which case just close the schools for a few weeks), but in the United States there are a lot of mask mandates in schools being pushed in areas where the hospitals are not under any significant pressure. That is nonsense.
Sure in an ideal world as soon as hospitalizations or case rates went above some metric we'd introduce stricter local procedures, hopefully fast enough that the wave of hospitalizations 1-2 weeks later isn't too bad.
But so far it seems like we're too slow on that. Things get bad, then we start changing our behavior. Time matters and it's not binary. That's been the whole principle of managing this thing in the US at the beginning. If you let the spike get too big too quickly then it gets bad before we can take corrective action.
And how would we even manage changing these guidelines on a week-by-week basis in every zip code? How do you even disseminate that information to all businesses, citizens, parents?
Of course I don't think all restrictions make sense in all places, nor do I want them to go on forever. Vaccinations for a large majority of eligible individuals would go a long way to reducing spread and hospitalization load.
In theory we are trying to bide time until we get there (manageable COVID, not zero COVID) but in the US at least we're not heading towards "large majority" very quickly, and we are still having those exponential local spikes.
Probably pretty close to zero when we’re talking about being in a classroom with 30 other kids for a few hours. The mask protects against things going straight ahead, not against slowly filling up a room with aerosols.
I guess masking up might mean everyone gets slowly infected over the course of days though (through aerosols), instead of getting a full dose of virus straight in the face. I presume that affects the severity of the subsequent disease.
I appreciate the simplicity of the message to mask up, since it’s almost certainly better than nothing, but it’s no panacea.
The likelihood that a cloth mask can do that in a classroom however…
Best mitigator would be good HEPA room air purifiers, ideally multiple per classroom.
They can be too loud to run while class is in session, especially if they move enough air to be worth a damn. Double-especially if you're also masked (so speaking is already a bit muffled).
There is no "best" here, mitigations all mitigate different things and work together to provide a safer environment.
Where do you think the extra air goes?
It still makes it into the air, just in different directions. Some of the viral particles are probably caught in the mask, but I’m not sure how much of the total we can count on.
Specifically, anything that covers your mouth.
If we had enough N95 masks to give to everyone (and they’d actually wear them) we could stop the virus within a few weeks :P
Hell, just switching to surgical masks would make a ton of difference.
Edit: Allow me to clarify - the research everyone is citing that says masking is effective in teachers and ineffective in students (the 37% number) predates both the delta variant and widespread infection in Southern states. Further, masking is understood etiologically as a prevention method and has been used successfully in other outbreaks and in other countries. Clinicians and policy makers as a rule work with incomplete data in an emerging situation, so unequivocally stating that masking kids in schools doesn't help is a very bad misrepresentation of both the data/research and the implications to policy.
My understanding was that masks were primarily effective at preventing high viral load droplets from spreading the virus during short interactions.
I don't have any source to prove that to be the case because data on the effectiveness of masks seems frustratingly sparse.
We may not have trials or studies (these things take time) to back a very certain and/or specific claim such as "do masks prevent the spread of Covid 19?" What we do have, is fundamental knowledge and common sense and so typically, in a clinical setting we ask these questions when any new situation arises (as it happens often in medicine):
- Does this reccomendation cause more harm than good?
- is there even a slight chance that this clinical decision would increase the percentage chance of survival?
- is it worth the inconvenience it could cause?
This is called Clinical Reasoning. Thinking critically and clinically is a core tenet of the field.
"Research shoes masks are still effective even when spending the whole day in the same room"
I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case and I worry that people are putting too much stake in masks when really social distancing is much more effective than masks ever will be.
This is a common attribute of infections and is really more of a math issue than anything SARS-specific. The bigger the initial dose, the sooner it will get to the impact stage, and the less prepared your immune system will be at that time.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 It does note that non-medical (e.g. cloth) masks may be less effective, but whether those are used a lot seems to depend on environment (nobody seems to use them here). Edit: One more for cloth masks https://www.nature.com/articles/jes201642
Key paragraph: Between Nov. 16 and Dec. 11, researchers found that infection rates were 37% lower in schools where teachers and staff members were required to wear masks. The difference between schools that did and did not require students to wear masks was not statistically significant.
A good recent article in NY Mag also discussing this issue, including the fact that the World Health Organization recommends against masking kids under six: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski...
Many countries in Europe have decided against masking for any students in K-12 schools because it is unclear that the harms outweigh the benefits. The idea there is some "simple" scientific & research consensus on this is wrong.
Is it worth the cost? That’s a different question.
I’m not really opposed to masks in a classroom as a mitigation method, but if people believe it will significantly alter the trajectory of the infections I have a bridge to sell them.
We have been on and off masks here in Denmark, and it seems to have no effect on spread. Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one.. from a family member or a friend..
> Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one..
The conclusion I would draw from your own beliefs here is that we should be wearing masks all the time, especially around family... not that masks don't work.
Personally while I wear a mask most of the time when out, I do feel that we really don't know as much as we'd like to think about mask efficacy. The trouble is your own reasoning here is inconsistent. Either masks don't work as well as we think and risk of infection is equally likely in public or at home, or they do work effectively but we don't wear them at important times.
The argument you should have from your own beliefs here should be for more mask wearing not less.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00256...
We now know that Covid is spread by minute particles so small that they float on the air for hours. Cloth masks do not filter the air you breathe from particles of that size.
You would need an n95 mask or better to do that job.
Remember that mask wearing almost completely did away with last year's Flu season while we simultaneously had a huge Covid surge.
And not just that but you have to wear it properly. This means if you have a beard, you better shave it.
>Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.
On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...
They can simulate blowing stuff through various types of filter material all they want, it doesn't change that none of the epidemiological curves reacted to mask mandates anywhere.
They do work great as an ideological symbol though, thanks to the topic's polarisation.
“Masks don’t work” and then in the next paragraph “mostly you get COVID when not wearing [a mask]”
So basically, the masks are effective, but people take the masks off around family and friends and if one of their friends or family has COVID they will pass it on during the unmasked time.
You’re not catching covid in situations where you’d typically wear a mask (regardless of masking), rather where you typical don’t wear a mask, like from family member.
I’m not really saying I agree, but I think that is the context.
If you notice at the moment the corona numbers are high in Netherlands and Denmark while low in Germany.
Because Germany has kept more restrictions in place, in particular mask wearing in shops and transport.
We wore them for a year. Covid is still here. It won't go away if we wear them for another year. It won't go away if we wear them for another ten years.
That sounds like an argument against bullet proof vests. People still die while wearing them. LEO have been wearing them for years. Obviously, they don't work.
You don't understand the actual goal of wearing masks: protected people and reducing the spread of covid. It's not going to magically eliminate covid when half the country doesn't actually wear them.
So in other words, your expectation is that we'll be wearing masks for the rest of our lives?
Do LEO wear them 24/7 or only in appropriate situations?
However, on the question of medical-grade masks, there is clear research that now shows some masks (e.g. FFP3 masks) are effective in stopping COVID-19 infection.
Covid: Masks upgrade cuts infection risk, research finds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57636360
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027663917/rsv-covid-children
> At Texas Children's Hospital in Houston on Thursday, 25 of 45 hospitalized pediatric patients were diagnosed with RSV as well as COVID-19. "A hospitalization rate much higher than for either virus alone," according to officials.
> At the moment there is little data available on the impact of contracting both viruses and whether the two together can make a person sicker. But health officials worry it could put young patients — who are not eligible for the vaccine — at greater risk.
Would be interested to see the exact breakdown here. If 19 children are hospitalized with RSV+Covid, 5 with just RSV, and 1 with just Covid, it could just indicate RSV is particularly virulent for children and they are likely to also have Covid given they have been exposed to RSV. This would certainly fit with what we already know about the relative risks posed to children by RSV vs Covid.
This article from the Guardian suggests that the reason RSV is having an off-season surge is because children now have an "immunity debt" from being isolated as part of Covid protocols. It would probably not be a good idea not for us to double down on the measures that have brought us to this point. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/new-zealand-ch...
Good thread by an MD here discussing these issues and saying that coinfection rates are 50% for kids: https://twitter.com/contrarian4data/status/14298548764151316...
There's no evidence that wearing masks prevents contracting Covid (or any other airborne virus). It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it, but if you already have it, the schools send you home anyway. It's also not as if masks are themselves neutral either - constant mask wearing is associated with higher rates of bacterial pneumonia. Even medical professionals never wore masks all day (until last year), just when they were performing surgery.
What you just described is the same thing, it's simply a matter of perspective. If you wear a mask, it helps me by reducing the chances that you spread it to me if you have it but aren't experiencing symptoms yet. It works the same way in reverse. I don't wear a mask to protect myself, I wear it to protect others in the case that I'm shedding virus and don't know it yet.
Most of the schools that do testing due so weekly. With delta someone can be contagious up to 36 hours after infection. That means someone who gets tested on Friday morning, goes to a poorly ventilated party with a COVID-19+ that evening and returns to school on Monday could spread the disease for a week.
Also we have a large group of unvaccinated group which are under kids under 12. With life going back to normal, the standard diseases are back like RSV, paraflu and others. Get two at the same time and it’s a emergency room visit. Get 3 at the same time and it’s life threatening. Two at the same time isn’t uncommon before covid. Now my pediatrician says 3 is happening and it’s a kid killer. It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.