You just said, a paragraph up, that they had all been in the auditorium for 3 hours, which (again, according to you) is "far longer than it takes" to get sick. Let's assume you're right -- we have an auditorium overcrowded with kids, many of whom are spewing aerosolized, highly transmissible virus into an enclosed space. For hours.
So yes, worrying about a silly mask on one kid, in that context, is more than a little hysterical. I'm going to wager that most of these kids weren't wearing rigorously fitted respirators anyway.
Even if you don't believe that (why wouldn't you?), the idea that a moment of "mask down" is going to present any sort of exceptional additional risk is clearly nonsense.
The more viral load you're exposed to, the higher the infection risk. Someone speaking directly to you in close quarters with an active infection is, indeed, a significant risk factor for acquiring the virus.
It doesn't make sense to argue that it doesn't matter because they were also possibly exposed to other students for 3 hours earlier.
No. Infectious dose may matter for severity of disease (this is a hypothesis; it has never been demonstrated). Concluding that it matters in this situation is clearly silly. You're talking about hours in a room, with hundreds of kids. You think they're all wearing perfectly fitted respirators? Come now. You honestly want to suggest that one kid pulling his mask down makes a big difference in the overall aerosol rave being described here?
Remember, we don't even know what kind of mask is being discussed. If the kid in question is wearing a cloth mask, it probably didn't matter either way, based on all current evidence.
Also remember: SARS-CoV2 shows a clear pattern of overdispersion. Most people don't spread to anyone. The chances that any particular encounter will lead to your infection are very low, regardless of masks. Put a hundred kids in a room, though, and those tiny probabilities start to multiply. Sitting for hours in a room full of hundreds of other people is dramatically higher risk than some guy pulling his mask down for a second (but the former doesn't let you blame your outcome on specific person, so it isn't nearly as satisfying, is it?)
This is the problem with Covid discussions on the internet. People get one fact half-right ("viral load matters"), and use that to generate the scariest possible hot-takes.
The kids were packed into an overcrowded auditorium so much that they completely ran out of seats and had cram even more people into the auditorium than it had seating. They did this for 3 hours, far longer than it takes to acquire COVID from someone sitting next to you. Kids were literally testing positive inside of the auditorium during this time.
> * The way they talk about the other kid asking questions "with their mask down". To be obsessed with this sort of minutiae as a kid is scary to me.
That kid with the mask down had literally just tested positive for COVID. That's not "minutiae". It's baffling that you think the problem in this scenario is that he's concerned about a COVID-positive person in close quarters having a mask down, as opposed to the fact that a COVID-positive person has their mask down. You must be harboring some major biases.
> * Kids thinking about test...and apparently being given something like 5 tests in a single day? This seems wasteful and hysterical on behalf of the school.
Did you miss the part where so many of the faculty and staff were out sick that they were struggling to coordinate everything? I agree it's uncoordinated and wasteful, but the point is that they're being forced to try to run a school when a huge number of the faculty are too sick to do so.