General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors.
And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we've had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring/resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.
We're walking headlong into a disaster and nobody seems to care. And that's not even dealing with the problem of Global Climate Change which, guess what? Still hasn't gone away and there doesn't seem to be much interest in caring about that either, not that there ever was.
You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.
Funny to watch the Atlantic change directions on COVID over the last few months. I go back and forth on masks. In general I find them to be a minor inconvenience, although I believe they're more inconvenient for me than most because I'm blind and no matter what I do they always fog up my glasses.
But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance quickly. Try taking a 6 hour flight with a 2 year old that's required to keep his mask on the entire flight, and when he takes it off (because he's 2, of course he's going to take it off) the flight attendants threaten to turn the plane around and ban you permanently. That gets old quick.
I was in a coffee shop the other day and my mask broke. Everyone takes their mask off to sip their drink or eat their pastries, but I was immediately asked to leave when the functional mask I walked in with broke. They didn't have any extras, I wasn't carrying around more than one mask. It was embarrassing. It's pretty easy to grow tired of these mandates when your situation deviates slightly from the norm.
At this point, I'm in favor of a "protect yourself" direction. If you're concerned, put on an N95 and a face shield and sanitize your hands often. It's clear that shutting down society to the point necessary to restrict the spread of COVID is not feasible, and all the halfway measures we've taken haven't achieved their stated goals. It's just a nuisance at this point.
This is the kind of thing that just drives me crazy.
If the mandates were at the very least logically consistent, I would not consider them a burden. "You are not allowed into the restaurant unless you are masked, but you may immediately take it off once you've walked 10 feet to your table" is nonsense. Forcing you to leave the coffee shop with everyone unmasking to drink anyway is nonsense.
It is security theater. It is virtue signalling. And if you have the audacity to question the irrational rules, people unironically call you a murderer.
Wearing masks whenever possible doesn't bother me in the slightest. I've been loving it that COVID has normalized wearing a mask in public because I'd like to do it all the time for the rest of my life without being judged for it.
But I don't want anybody mandating it. I've been trying to work out in my own mind why I switched to being more, uh, 'deontologist' if you will, several years ago. I'm just starting to almost be able to articulate it. If you take a consequentialist stance, then any catastrophe sufficient to put your chosen 'utility' at risk instantly justifies literally any measure that mitigates that risk. As long as the measure is outside the realm of the thing you regard as 'utility'. Is free speech for its own sake not part of 'utility' but only a means to increase it? Then out the window it goes when it causes problems. Same for privacy, leaving your home without permission from an authority, pretty much anything we think of as freedom.
It greatly disturbs me to find the Overton Window in a place where I see smart Americans debating every day whether strongly authoritarian and invasive measures are OK, if they save lives.
> Try taking a 6 hour flight with a 2 year old that's required to keep his mask on the entire flight, and when he takes it off (because he's 2, of course he's going to take it off) the flight attendants threaten to turn the plane around and ban you permanently.
Never heard about this, source? Toddlers tend to be somewhat exempt from mask mandates because they're toddlers and everyone understands when they don't comply.
https://www.tabsynth.com/product/badger-seal-mask-fitter/
I broke my nose playing baseball in high school and have an odd shaped ridge that prevents the metal in the mask from forming a tight seal. I use these to prevent fogging, works great for me.
My kids attend a university in Canada and live in residence on campus. They have had incredibly strict rules around masking and gatherings. It's clear that they are only considering one variable - number of infections - and it seems like they aren't considering any other factors.
For example, in the dorm there is a common area with a piano. Because of COVID, playing that piano is banned. Even if there was a reasonable danger of contracting COVID from a piano, there are also mental health benefits to playing music. It doesn't feel like the piano ban is in the best interests of the people who live there and I don't think the people who set the rules care because they can't measure that. They can only measure infections.
This is the fundamental issue with coronavirus mitigation measures. There are circumstances in which "drop everything" makes sense - if coronavirus were ten times more fatal, we'd do it naturally.
But in general, looking at life from a perspective of "what is the minimum possible quality of life we can have" is depressing and fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit.
I tend to think that people who operate in this way are subhuman, in the genuine sense of the word - they seem more like bureaucratic automatons than living beings with spirits and hopes and dreams.
Like, yeah, I will take the risk of contracting coronavirus to play the piano, because I want the piano in my life. The piano is what life is, life is not simply breathing and eating.
Reminds me of (now takeout only) restaurants which have their bathrooms closed "for covid," or public drinking fountains which are still closed "for covid." Not really much to due with covid at this point I suspect. So it may not really be about measuring infections at all, but that played piano makes noise and requires tuning, and so administration would rather just not, and now there is an excuse.
And if its anything like American colleges, the draconian restrictions don't actually stop the students from crowding into over-packed apartment and house parties over the weekends.
The piano thing feels like a "we gotta do something" from a board with very little power over things that would limit transmission. Maybe they have a separate dorm board.
It is like where I live, the library closed becouse that was the only thing the county could close.
And there is like never more than 10 people there at the same time for a huge building. They could just have closed the cafeteria and remove the reading chairs. Etc.
This one-dimensional approach is especially bad since the emergence of omicron, where number of infections doesn’t even capture the level of COVID danger.
I strongly suspect that playing the piano is banned due to the possibility of social gatherings of people in close proximity to each other listening to the piano - not contracting covid from the piano itself.
Presumably the piano ban was brought in last year, when people though that Covid spreading through surfaces was a big problem - and that piano ban hasn't been re-considered now that we know that Covid is mostly spread through inhaling shared air.
There have been numerous studies showing that mechanically N95 and equivalent masks can greatly reduce the emission of coronavirus and influenza, and can also greatly reduce the intake of coronavirus-sized particles.
That's why these types of articles always focus on mask mandate effectiveness instead of mask effectiveness. How many schools with mask mandates also have their lunch indoors with poor ventilation? Can you wear a mask while eating? How many have their noses sticking out all day? How many are wearing cloth masks?
It's like having a kid constantly getting pinkeye from not wiping their ass properly, and then saying toilet paper is pointless, instead of teaching the kid how to wipe and wash properly.
This argument is poorly constructed. I think there could be better ones, but here’s my problem. It goes through the three CDC studies and correctly observes that they fail to separate regions that have high vaccination rates from schools without a mask mandate. Indeed, the ideal experiment would involve two schools that are otherwise identical in the same geographical area with high vaccination rates: one that has no mask policy, and one that has mandatory masking. The article essentially complains that such an experiment has yet to be done, so therefore, the universal masking recommendation is unfounded.
It is empirical fact that vaccination rates on a county by county is strongly predicted by the overall political alignment of a county (not implying anything further). It is also empirical fact that mask mandates are also correlated in a similar way. It is also fact that COVID-19 is an airborne disease.
The first two facts determine that the ideal experiment cannot accidentally occur in the United States. The last fact precludes an intentional experiment ethically. But the last fact at least makes the masking recommendation reasonable.
I think the political correlation with these two variables (masking and vaccination) is a confounding variable. It would be very preferable for it be otherwise, but complaining that it is so while not seriously engaging with the real situation is a poor argument.
A randomized study was run in Bangladesh. There they handed out masks to randomly selected villages among a pool of 600 villages with similar vaccination and political stances.
That study showed that the effect of surgical masks was statistically significant when used by the elderly 50+ population. For other age groups and for cloth masks, the advantage was statistically insignificant.
All the headlines around this study, including from the CDC were basically 'Masks proven to be effective!', 'masks work!', but that's a very lax definition of effective.
There's another problem with the article's argument. It contends that the many studies on mask effectiveness have various shortcomings such as not being specific to kids, or having vaccination rates as a confounding variable. And therefore, we should not have mask mandates (despite the evidence that they work, however non-specific to school children they may be).
But its reason for concluding that children should not wear masks is because of all of these issues that themselves aren't well studied or understood by the article's own admission:
> Despite how widespread all-day masking of children in school is, the short-term and long-term consequences of this practice are not well understood, in part because no one has successfully collected large-scale systematic data and few researchers have tried.
Why in this case should the serious lack of evidence for the risks of masking children outweigh the greater-but-imperfect evidence for the risks of increased transmission of Covid by not masking children? It seems like a double-standard allowing the author to arrive at their desired conclusion.
From what I've been hearing, there are private schools not implementing masks mandates in the same areas as public schools that are. Those might be good places to look.
An interesting article. I was recently unimpressed by the new Virginia governor's first action to reaching the mandate on masks in schools. My county has elected to retain its own mask mandate.
At first blush a mask mandate is generally a public good. I keep my germs to myself, you keep yours too yourself, and we don't get the flu, or a cold, or COVID, whatever. And so for me despite not living wearing a mask I have been happy to anytime I'm near others.
The article makes a decent case that, at least for kids in schools, the science to support the utility of masks just isn't there. At first I found this surprising - how could it not be? At least it should help. But kids are in school, together, for 6+ hours a day. I barely wear my mask properly for two hours at a time and I understand how they work. Kids don't care, they're just doing what they're told, cargo cult style. Of course they won't be written perfectly, which reduces their effectiveness. But the idea that they don't help at all, or at least statistically so, is astonishing.
And the article provides evidence of that, cutting neighboring counties in Tennessee with similar vaccination rates where one had a 23% lower making rate, but similar spread. How can that be? Truly fascinating.
Much as we've seen the downside of forced closures and lockdowns, this article reminds us that there may be downsides for kids and masks. I wasn't open to this possibility previously. What could be the downside to putting on a mask? And the answer is, we just don't know. How can we follow the science if we don't have any research?
I continue to be glad to be a resident of the US, whose federalist system allows all these different jurisdictions to try different rules that may work better for them. It gives us a chance to study these differences and learn from them.
Really thought provoking article. While I wait for more studies, guess I'll keep wearing this mask around people. Can't hurt, right? Probably.
I live somewhere with mild winters so the schools don't have any hallways (the classrooms just open to the outside). This meant that kids could at least get a break from masking between classes. However, after coming back from winter break, the schools started mandating masks outside as well as in, and including during PE class. As you can imagine, my asthmatic daughter was not pleased.
> after coming back from winter break, the schools started mandating masks outside as well as in
While the effectiveness of masks at schools indoors is questionable, is there any evidence at all for using, let alone mandating masks outside? I would have thought that the sheer volume and circulation of fresh air should dilute viral particles below the infectious concentration. What are they protecting against: direct sneezing into someone else's face?
It appears that the article is looking at vaccination in addition to mask usage. There are many areas of the US where vaccination percentages are relatively low and vaccination percentage of children between the ages of 5 to 11 are even lower.
While children may not wear masks correctly, at a population level, it stands to reason that wearing masks will reduce the chance of transmission. Just like condoms have a theoretical effectiveness of 98% when used properly, but real world use shows an effectiveness rate of 82%, mask usage should still reduce transmission, but not to the extent that they would given proper use. But that doesn't mean that they're not effective at all and there's no need to use them. Looking at it from a population perspective versus an individual perspective in terms of transmission and the chance of contracting the disease, they should still have some beneficial effect.
The other part of the equation is the use of multiple strategies to mitigate transmission. For example, social distancing, limiting the number of people, and reducing the time spent indoors. All these factors put together will reduce transmission even if people aren't perfect in terms of compliance.
You may look at the data of how much protection masks add between the ages of 5 to 11 and 2 to 5. And how much other mitigations measures add (ventilation, cohorting, etc). You'll find that high quality masks for teachers reduce spread a lot. Masks for kids - the effect can't be clearly registered.
And using masks for kids, particularly outdoors is a hazard in itself. Masks tend to block lower peripheral vision. Which results in kids tripping and falling more often. Falls and playground injuries are a common cause of hospitalizations in the US [the order of 100k kids/year]. Masks also reduce ability to communicate [hazard]. And it is unclear what is the long-term impact on kids development.
Overall, at least to me, masking kids outdoors at this stage seem wrong. Indoor - questionable, it'd be good to see more statistics for this particular mitigation measure, if de-correlated from other mitigation measures.
In Taiwan we've been wearing masks for over 2 years with near zero complaint at school. I have to remind a few kids a day to put it over their nose. We've had Omicron here for awhile, but it's still only a trickle of cases, with no exponential explosion. The policies here, with contact tracing, quarantine and masks, have kept things open and people from dying. I don't understand the hesitancy.
It's the incredible selfishness of some Americans (speaking as an American). Plenty of people who take their own personal comfort and opinions as higher priority over others.
Even from day one we've had people refusing to mask/sanitize/social distance, claiming it "violates their freedom".
Same here in Japan. When I leave home, I put on mask and keep it on until I return home. Only time I take off mask is to eat and drink. Most people do the same.
KISS, We have kept it simple. There is no discussion about when to wear or not wear, who need to wear or not, what type of mask to wear or not.
Hm... this does not actually make an argument against masks in school.
It's perfectly fair to point out the limitations of the available studies. Of course we want better ones -- that's a good argument for more, better studies. But the lack of absolute proof isn't an argument against masks in school. That's dumb. Until we conduct some well-designed rigorous controlled experiments on human children (which we'll never do, for presumably obvious reasons) we are going to have to make decisions with imperfect knowledge.
There is substantial evidence that a properly worn N95 or KN95 mask reduces the transmission of covid, right?
Can children be swayed/educated/convinced to wear a quality mask often enough to make a difference in the transmission of covid among their teachers or their families? IDK. Good question. We aren't completely sure, but probably.
Maybe we should answer that before killing masks in school. I mean... let's not be dumb, right?
Masks aren't exactly burdensome. We make kids wear shirts and shoes, even when it's unnecessary in summer. Given the current situation, if you could magically set aside politics and the associated mouth-breathers (which of course we can't) wouldn't we actually demand proof that masks are a net negative before we stop mandating them?
To me, this is a question of how much do we allow "dumb" to run the way things are. Apparently, it's quite a lot. I'm curious how far down we'll go before the end?
> Masks aren't exactly burdensome. We make kids wear shirts and shoes, even when it's unnecessary in summer. Given the current situation, if you could magically set aside politics and the associated mouth-breathers (which of course we can't) wouldn't we actually demand proof that masks are a net negative before we stop mandating them?
normally you're supposed to actually demand proof that something is a net positive before you start mandating it, instead of saying "it's not exactly burdensome, why not?", and then going ahead and doing it.
shirts and shoes don't obscure faces, which are used to communicate nonverbally. one of the main advantages of public/private schooling over homeschooling (though there's obviously ways to mitigate this for homeschoolers) is the social interactions between children are valuable in teaching them basic social skills more or less organically.
you have to stop and think about nth-order effects when making broad sweeping authoritarianesque mandates like this, it's never as simple as, "well, they have to wear shirts and shoes to school don't they? how are masks any different?"
> But the lack of absolute proof isn't an argument against masks in school. That's dumb.
How so? It seems more ignorant to assume that masks would help more when the data we do have doesn’t show that.
> Can children be swayed/educated/convinced to wear a quality mask often enough to make a difference in the transmission of covid among their teachers or their families? IDK. Good question. We aren't completely sure, but probably.
You call the authors ideas dumb, but then yourself make unfounded inferences as an argument for continuing to require masks in schools.
Vaccines for Covid are available.
Vaccines do not stop the spread of Covid.
Vaccines do not stop you from getting Covid.
Vaccines do reduce the probability of severe/fatal cases of covid.
Masks are available.
Most masks in most situations do little to stop the spread of Covid.
Well fitted N95s are more effective.
Getting vaccinated or wearing a mask is clearly a personal health decision.
Vaccine mandates are ridiculous given the above.
Mask mandates are ridiculous given the above.
Mandates in general show little impact on actually changing behavior.
The risk to children is incredibly low.
The coronavirus is endemic, we are all going to get it.
Lets move on already.
If you are fearful of coronavirus or at risk you can do what you think is necessary to stay safe. You don’t get to use your fear or neuroses to control others.
Wtf, masks absolutely work. Who is pushing this stuff and for what nefarious reasons? Do they think all children should get exposed early to the virus and then we'll develop heard immunity in decades to come? We have the vaccine for that.
The case against masks is quite trivial and generalizable across most industries.
Today, a teacher now has two realistic options:
a) self-isolate indefinitely, either teaching remotely or quitting their job
b) contract coronavirus at some point
Given that, masks are an irrelevance. A teacher who is clinically vulnerable and unwilling to roll the dice is left only with the option to quit their job, regardless of whether masks are used, or windows are left open, or whatever else.
Coronavirus is too contagious for any sort of avoidance strategy to actually work. It's not like, say, cooking chicken, in which you can basically solve food poisoning.
There is no valid scientific or medical basis to mandate masks at school. It's pure scientism and politics. For anyone who believes that mask mandates should continue please take the time to educate yourself by listening to this panel discussion by a group of leading physicians. UCSF professor and infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi explains the current science very clearly.
What? Do masks reduce infection rates? If yes, mandates work. If no, mandates don’t. Spoiler: they do. [0]
This is pants-on-head stupid, and has nothing at all to do with politics. Mandates increase adoption rates of measures that are proven to help, and trying to manipulate the situation to say otherwise is the problem, not the mandate.
Anyone opposing masking in schools at this point is literally choosing to risk killing children for stupid political points, and should be profoundly ashamed of their behavior.
For example: June 29, 2021: "I actually do not wear masks unless the business asks me to, bc I feel really protected by my vaccine, and I also feel that I can't spread it to others...these vaccines are effective against variants, they make it so that you can't transmit..."
I may be missing something, but I don't see any sort statistical accounting for vaccination rates in any of this article's referenced studies. The authors explicitly use this to dismiss studies that saw mask effectiveness, but then go on to offer similarly deficient studies as evidence arguing against masks in schools.
> In the panicked spring of 2020, as health officials scrambled to keep communities safe, they recommended various restrictions and interventions, sometimes in the absence of rigorous science supporting them. That was understandable at the time.
The fact that they were enacted with such zeal in the absence of rigorous science is why some/many people don't want them removed now. What was instituted without science cannot be removed by science.
If anything, the same emotional manipulation must be used. They used to say "we have to lock up if only to save one life". Now it should be "we need to go back to normal if only to save one child from killing himself from isolation".
I thought the paragraphs about requiring KN95 in schools were interesting.
My kids' school district recently had a policy change that requires everyone to wear KN95 or KF94 masks. What I've noticed is that most kids (including mine) have switched from high quality (Halo) well fitting cloths masks with filters to 95 or 94s with huge gaps around their noses. It is hard to believe that this is an improvement in safety.
It’s worth pointing out that the U.K. government’s recommendations has always been - throughout the pandemic - that little children should not wear masks in school [1].
It may be true that children wearing masks in class could potentially prevent some indirect deaths, but we have to draw a balance. We do this with everything else.
Countless lives can be saved if we ban cars, planes, sugar, dogs, ladders, beaches, and knives.
Where we draw the line is a matter of opinion, not of fact.
[1] “Based on current evidence and the measures that schools are already putting in place, such as the system of controls and consistent bubbles, face coverings will not be necessary in the classroom even where social distancing is not possible. Face coverings could have a negative impact on teaching and their use in the classroom should be avoided.”
I’m sure this comment will be buried but I’ll talk about my experiences. Our school has a mask policy and transmission in the classroom has been almost nonexistent.
The district north of us has no mask policy and it’s been a shit show. My friend is a teacher there and they don’t bother with close contacts or tracing. Basically everyone got covid and they had to shut the schools down because so many teachers were sick.
This has been while the hospitals have been full of covid cases this fall and winter. Kids might not get real sick, but it infects a bunch of family, who can end up in the hospitals.
The time to roll back the mask mandates is either at the end of this school year or when we have widespread availability of the Pfizer drug paxlivod and folks can get ahold of it and take it when they have covid.
[+] [-] taylodl|4 years ago|reply
And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They're watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we've had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring/resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.
We're walking headlong into a disaster and nobody seems to care. And that's not even dealing with the problem of Global Climate Change which, guess what? Still hasn't gone away and there doesn't seem to be much interest in caring about that either, not that there ever was.
You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline.
[+] [-] ngngngng|4 years ago|reply
But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance quickly. Try taking a 6 hour flight with a 2 year old that's required to keep his mask on the entire flight, and when he takes it off (because he's 2, of course he's going to take it off) the flight attendants threaten to turn the plane around and ban you permanently. That gets old quick.
I was in a coffee shop the other day and my mask broke. Everyone takes their mask off to sip their drink or eat their pastries, but I was immediately asked to leave when the functional mask I walked in with broke. They didn't have any extras, I wasn't carrying around more than one mask. It was embarrassing. It's pretty easy to grow tired of these mandates when your situation deviates slightly from the norm.
At this point, I'm in favor of a "protect yourself" direction. If you're concerned, put on an N95 and a face shield and sanitize your hands often. It's clear that shutting down society to the point necessary to restrict the spread of COVID is not feasible, and all the halfway measures we've taken haven't achieved their stated goals. It's just a nuisance at this point.
[+] [-] dahfizz|4 years ago|reply
If the mandates were at the very least logically consistent, I would not consider them a burden. "You are not allowed into the restaurant unless you are masked, but you may immediately take it off once you've walked 10 feet to your table" is nonsense. Forcing you to leave the coffee shop with everyone unmasking to drink anyway is nonsense.
It is security theater. It is virtue signalling. And if you have the audacity to question the irrational rules, people unironically call you a murderer.
[+] [-] psyc|4 years ago|reply
But I don't want anybody mandating it. I've been trying to work out in my own mind why I switched to being more, uh, 'deontologist' if you will, several years ago. I'm just starting to almost be able to articulate it. If you take a consequentialist stance, then any catastrophe sufficient to put your chosen 'utility' at risk instantly justifies literally any measure that mitigates that risk. As long as the measure is outside the realm of the thing you regard as 'utility'. Is free speech for its own sake not part of 'utility' but only a means to increase it? Then out the window it goes when it causes problems. Same for privacy, leaving your home without permission from an authority, pretty much anything we think of as freedom.
It greatly disturbs me to find the Overton Window in a place where I see smart Americans debating every day whether strongly authoritarian and invasive measures are OK, if they save lives.
[+] [-] phailhaus|4 years ago|reply
Never heard about this, source? Toddlers tend to be somewhat exempt from mask mandates because they're toddlers and everyone understands when they don't comply.
[+] [-] speedgeek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|4 years ago|reply
For example, in the dorm there is a common area with a piano. Because of COVID, playing that piano is banned. Even if there was a reasonable danger of contracting COVID from a piano, there are also mental health benefits to playing music. It doesn't feel like the piano ban is in the best interests of the people who live there and I don't think the people who set the rules care because they can't measure that. They can only measure infections.
[+] [-] throwaway22032|4 years ago|reply
But in general, looking at life from a perspective of "what is the minimum possible quality of life we can have" is depressing and fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit.
I tend to think that people who operate in this way are subhuman, in the genuine sense of the word - they seem more like bureaucratic automatons than living beings with spirits and hopes and dreams.
Like, yeah, I will take the risk of contracting coronavirus to play the piano, because I want the piano in my life. The piano is what life is, life is not simply breathing and eating.
[+] [-] uxp100|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhino369|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|4 years ago|reply
It is like where I live, the library closed becouse that was the only thing the county could close.
And there is like never more than 10 people there at the same time for a huge building. They could just have closed the cafeteria and remove the reading chairs. Etc.
[+] [-] huetius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stewbrew|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speedgeek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] abfan1127|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elsonrodriguez|4 years ago|reply
That's why these types of articles always focus on mask mandate effectiveness instead of mask effectiveness. How many schools with mask mandates also have their lunch indoors with poor ventilation? Can you wear a mask while eating? How many have their noses sticking out all day? How many are wearing cloth masks?
It's like having a kid constantly getting pinkeye from not wiping their ass properly, and then saying toilet paper is pointless, instead of teaching the kid how to wipe and wash properly.
[+] [-] docfort|4 years ago|reply
It is empirical fact that vaccination rates on a county by county is strongly predicted by the overall political alignment of a county (not implying anything further). It is also empirical fact that mask mandates are also correlated in a similar way. It is also fact that COVID-19 is an airborne disease.
The first two facts determine that the ideal experiment cannot accidentally occur in the United States. The last fact precludes an intentional experiment ethically. But the last fact at least makes the masking recommendation reasonable.
I think the political correlation with these two variables (masking and vaccination) is a confounding variable. It would be very preferable for it be otherwise, but complaining that it is so while not seriously engaging with the real situation is a poor argument.
[+] [-] aeternum|4 years ago|reply
That study showed that the effect of surgical masks was statistically significant when used by the elderly 50+ population. For other age groups and for cloth masks, the advantage was statistically insignificant.
All the headlines around this study, including from the CDC were basically 'Masks proven to be effective!', 'masks work!', but that's a very lax definition of effective.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/09/masks-rand...
[+] [-] JangoSteve|4 years ago|reply
But its reason for concluding that children should not wear masks is because of all of these issues that themselves aren't well studied or understood by the article's own admission:
> Despite how widespread all-day masking of children in school is, the short-term and long-term consequences of this practice are not well understood, in part because no one has successfully collected large-scale systematic data and few researchers have tried.
Why in this case should the serious lack of evidence for the risks of masking children outweigh the greater-but-imperfect evidence for the risks of increased transmission of Covid by not masking children? It seems like a double-standard allowing the author to arrive at their desired conclusion.
[+] [-] Izkata|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmyswimmy|4 years ago|reply
At first blush a mask mandate is generally a public good. I keep my germs to myself, you keep yours too yourself, and we don't get the flu, or a cold, or COVID, whatever. And so for me despite not living wearing a mask I have been happy to anytime I'm near others.
The article makes a decent case that, at least for kids in schools, the science to support the utility of masks just isn't there. At first I found this surprising - how could it not be? At least it should help. But kids are in school, together, for 6+ hours a day. I barely wear my mask properly for two hours at a time and I understand how they work. Kids don't care, they're just doing what they're told, cargo cult style. Of course they won't be written perfectly, which reduces their effectiveness. But the idea that they don't help at all, or at least statistically so, is astonishing.
And the article provides evidence of that, cutting neighboring counties in Tennessee with similar vaccination rates where one had a 23% lower making rate, but similar spread. How can that be? Truly fascinating.
Much as we've seen the downside of forced closures and lockdowns, this article reminds us that there may be downsides for kids and masks. I wasn't open to this possibility previously. What could be the downside to putting on a mask? And the answer is, we just don't know. How can we follow the science if we don't have any research?
I continue to be glad to be a resident of the US, whose federalist system allows all these different jurisdictions to try different rules that may work better for them. It gives us a chance to study these differences and learn from them.
Really thought provoking article. While I wait for more studies, guess I'll keep wearing this mask around people. Can't hurt, right? Probably.
[+] [-] aidenn0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azangru|4 years ago|reply
While the effectiveness of masks at schools indoors is questionable, is there any evidence at all for using, let alone mandating masks outside? I would have thought that the sheer volume and circulation of fresh air should dilute viral particles below the infectious concentration. What are they protecting against: direct sneezing into someone else's face?
[+] [-] siquick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sul_tasto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fifteenforty|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] u801e|4 years ago|reply
While children may not wear masks correctly, at a population level, it stands to reason that wearing masks will reduce the chance of transmission. Just like condoms have a theoretical effectiveness of 98% when used properly, but real world use shows an effectiveness rate of 82%, mask usage should still reduce transmission, but not to the extent that they would given proper use. But that doesn't mean that they're not effective at all and there's no need to use them. Looking at it from a population perspective versus an individual perspective in terms of transmission and the chance of contracting the disease, they should still have some beneficial effect.
The other part of the equation is the use of multiple strategies to mitigate transmission. For example, social distancing, limiting the number of people, and reducing the time spent indoors. All these factors put together will reduce transmission even if people aren't perfect in terms of compliance.
[+] [-] dchichkov|4 years ago|reply
And using masks for kids, particularly outdoors is a hazard in itself. Masks tend to block lower peripheral vision. Which results in kids tripping and falling more often. Falls and playground injuries are a common cause of hospitalizations in the US [the order of 100k kids/year]. Masks also reduce ability to communicate [hazard]. And it is unclear what is the long-term impact on kids development.
Overall, at least to me, masking kids outdoors at this stage seem wrong. Indoor - questionable, it'd be good to see more statistics for this particular mitigation measure, if de-correlated from other mitigation measures.
[+] [-] another_story|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajford|4 years ago|reply
Even from day one we've had people refusing to mask/sanitize/social distance, claiming it "violates their freedom".
[+] [-] akg_67|4 years ago|reply
KISS, We have kept it simple. There is no discussion about when to wear or not wear, who need to wear or not, what type of mask to wear or not.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmull|4 years ago|reply
It's perfectly fair to point out the limitations of the available studies. Of course we want better ones -- that's a good argument for more, better studies. But the lack of absolute proof isn't an argument against masks in school. That's dumb. Until we conduct some well-designed rigorous controlled experiments on human children (which we'll never do, for presumably obvious reasons) we are going to have to make decisions with imperfect knowledge.
There is substantial evidence that a properly worn N95 or KN95 mask reduces the transmission of covid, right?
Can children be swayed/educated/convinced to wear a quality mask often enough to make a difference in the transmission of covid among their teachers or their families? IDK. Good question. We aren't completely sure, but probably.
Maybe we should answer that before killing masks in school. I mean... let's not be dumb, right?
Masks aren't exactly burdensome. We make kids wear shirts and shoes, even when it's unnecessary in summer. Given the current situation, if you could magically set aside politics and the associated mouth-breathers (which of course we can't) wouldn't we actually demand proof that masks are a net negative before we stop mandating them?
To me, this is a question of how much do we allow "dumb" to run the way things are. Apparently, it's quite a lot. I'm curious how far down we'll go before the end?
[+] [-] adamrezich|4 years ago|reply
normally you're supposed to actually demand proof that something is a net positive before you start mandating it, instead of saying "it's not exactly burdensome, why not?", and then going ahead and doing it.
shirts and shoes don't obscure faces, which are used to communicate nonverbally. one of the main advantages of public/private schooling over homeschooling (though there's obviously ways to mitigate this for homeschoolers) is the social interactions between children are valuable in teaching them basic social skills more or less organically.
you have to stop and think about nth-order effects when making broad sweeping authoritarianesque mandates like this, it's never as simple as, "well, they have to wear shirts and shoes to school don't they? how are masks any different?"
[+] [-] plandis|4 years ago|reply
How so? It seems more ignorant to assume that masks would help more when the data we do have doesn’t show that.
> Can children be swayed/educated/convinced to wear a quality mask often enough to make a difference in the transmission of covid among their teachers or their families? IDK. Good question. We aren't completely sure, but probably.
You call the authors ideas dumb, but then yourself make unfounded inferences as an argument for continuing to require masks in schools.
[+] [-] pcmoney|4 years ago|reply
Masks are available. Most masks in most situations do little to stop the spread of Covid. Well fitted N95s are more effective.
Getting vaccinated or wearing a mask is clearly a personal health decision. Vaccine mandates are ridiculous given the above. Mask mandates are ridiculous given the above. Mandates in general show little impact on actually changing behavior.
The risk to children is incredibly low. The coronavirus is endemic, we are all going to get it.
Lets move on already.
If you are fearful of coronavirus or at risk you can do what you think is necessary to stay safe. You don’t get to use your fear or neuroses to control others.
[+] [-] hogrider|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway22032|4 years ago|reply
Today, a teacher now has two realistic options:
a) self-isolate indefinitely, either teaching remotely or quitting their job
b) contract coronavirus at some point
Given that, masks are an irrelevance. A teacher who is clinically vulnerable and unwilling to roll the dice is left only with the option to quit their job, regardless of whether masks are used, or windows are left open, or whatever else.
Coronavirus is too contagious for any sort of avoidance strategy to actually work. It's not like, say, cooking chicken, in which you can basically solve food poisoning.
[+] [-] nradov|4 years ago|reply
https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
https://profiles.ucsf.edu/monica.gandhi
Most European countries don't mandate masks for schoolchildren.
[+] [-] TameAntelope|4 years ago|reply
This is pants-on-head stupid, and has nothing at all to do with politics. Mandates increase adoption rates of measures that are proven to help, and trying to manipulate the situation to say otherwise is the problem, not the mandate.
Anyone opposing masking in schools at this point is literally choosing to risk killing children for stupid political points, and should be profoundly ashamed of their behavior.
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
[+] [-] ceejayoz|4 years ago|reply
For example: June 29, 2021: "I actually do not wear masks unless the business asks me to, bc I feel really protected by my vaccine, and I also feel that I can't spread it to others...these vaccines are effective against variants, they make it so that you can't transmit..."
[+] [-] jiveturkey|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for that.
[+] [-] 1shooner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endisneigh|4 years ago|reply
There’s no more need for masks. Vaccinate if you want, or don’t. If you get sick, or not, that’s on you.
It’s the same deal with a lot of other illnesses- you vaccinate or take the risk. It’s been this way for decades in schools.
Disclosure: triple vaxx’d moderna
[+] [-] xdennis|4 years ago|reply
The fact that they were enacted with such zeal in the absence of rigorous science is why some/many people don't want them removed now. What was instituted without science cannot be removed by science.
If anything, the same emotional manipulation must be used. They used to say "we have to lock up if only to save one life". Now it should be "we need to go back to normal if only to save one child from killing himself from isolation".
[+] [-] k2enemy|4 years ago|reply
My kids' school district recently had a policy change that requires everyone to wear KN95 or KF94 masks. What I've noticed is that most kids (including mine) have switched from high quality (Halo) well fitting cloths masks with filters to 95 or 94s with huge gaps around their noses. It is hard to believe that this is an improvement in safety.
[+] [-] alignItems|4 years ago|reply
It may be true that children wearing masks in class could potentially prevent some indirect deaths, but we have to draw a balance. We do this with everything else.
Countless lives can be saved if we ban cars, planes, sugar, dogs, ladders, beaches, and knives.
Where we draw the line is a matter of opinion, not of fact.
[1] “Based on current evidence and the measures that schools are already putting in place, such as the system of controls and consistent bubbles, face coverings will not be necessary in the classroom even where social distancing is not possible. Face coverings could have a negative impact on teaching and their use in the classroom should be avoided.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schoo...
[+] [-] brohoolio|4 years ago|reply
The district north of us has no mask policy and it’s been a shit show. My friend is a teacher there and they don’t bother with close contacts or tracing. Basically everyone got covid and they had to shut the schools down because so many teachers were sick.
This has been while the hospitals have been full of covid cases this fall and winter. Kids might not get real sick, but it infects a bunch of family, who can end up in the hospitals.
The time to roll back the mask mandates is either at the end of this school year or when we have widespread availability of the Pfizer drug paxlivod and folks can get ahold of it and take it when they have covid.