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.
If the childhood mortality risk associated with Covid is comparable to the flu (which seems to be the case) why weren't we masking every child before Covid?
The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff. It's not about protecting the individual children (at least not primarily, because they are so low risk). Whether or not this is still a useful approach probably depends on the locale. It seems like places where the Omicron wave is rapidly ending, having children wear masks is entirely pointless.
>The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff.
People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity? "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children to possibly impact hospital capacity elsewhere" is not something that makes sense to me. If this was just another bottleneck in some system and not related to the pandemic you'd address the real problem, right?
> People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity?
You mean like calling in the national guard to help alleviate the problem or busing in nurses from all over the country, or creating temporary wards, or fighting to get more ventilators and medications? All of those things and more have been happening.
> "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children
Not only are you minimizing the benefits here, but you're prioritizing potential outcomes over proven ones. That is not something that makes sense to me. I want to make my choices based on our best understanding of the evidence we have right now, not based on things that may or may not ever happen in the future.
Right now, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when community spread is high in your area are proven to do a lot of good to help prevent very real harms. That's enough for me.
Nurses in Boston have been striking for almost a year. I've seen one instance of calling in the national guard recently, and ventilators are no longer the preferred treatment protocol in every case. I haven't seen a single effort to literally build more hospital wings with ICU beds. Have you?
>Not only are you minimizing the benefits here
CDC's own studies did this, not me.
>but you're prioritizing potential outcomes over proven ones.
Yes exactly. We know that kids have an infinitesimally small risk from covid, we know that teachers have a similar risk profile if they're vaccinated. The "potential" outcomes are catastrophic to development, and we won't know for years what detrimental effects forcing small children to wear masks all the time will have.
Sorry, still doesn't make sense to me. We have one set of known knowns, and one of unknown-ish unknowns, and we're still doing this because people (not you, necessarily) seem to think the goal is to "never get covid".
> Nurses in Boston have been striking for almost a year
I'm surprised more haven't been. Nurses are being outright abused, but that doesn't change the fact that nurses are being asked to travel great distances to help with staffing issues. The whole situation in nursing is a huge mess right now for a lot of reasons.
> I've seen one instance of calling in the national guard recently
you should be paying more attention to the news, or possibility looking critically at where you're getting your news from since it's not serving you very well. I don't know which one you heard about but your list should include Washington, Georgia, Ohio, Oregon, Maine, New York, and New Hampshire. New Mexico has also called in the national guard because of omicron, but they want troops acting as substitute teachers.
> and ventilators are no longer the preferred treatment protocol in every case
> I haven't seen a single effort to literally build more hospital wings with ICU beds. Have you?
Yes I have. Most hospitals don't want to add entire new wings full of beds because covid isn't going to be like this forever, but in just the last few months here are some examples of hospitals doing wherever they can to add capacity:
https://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-nursing-homes-covid-...
This is on top of all the beds and overflow centers hospitals have been adding over the last two years. It's not that every hospital is waiting until they have people dying outside their doors to start adding beds either. One of the best US hospitals for heart surgeries is just outside of Chicago and they've renovated parts of their old partially demolished hospital building to keep on standby so they can handle covid cases in case they get overwhelmed like so many others have. It's a pretty smart way to gain some extra ICU space while keeping costs down.
Your facts are just very wrong or very incomplete. I recommend looking into this stuff a bit more using new sources.
"why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity?"
Maybe we should, but we are talking about an astounding cost, with ongoing upkeep, for once-every-hundred-year events. And that's just for new facilities - we already have nursing shortages.
Instead, we (and just about every other country) have used mitigation efforts to reduce the transmission rate when hospital capacity is threatened. It's a lot cheaper and can be done quickly, unlike building new ICU capacity and training new doctors and nurses (many of whom would be out of the job once the pandemic is over).
You say this is expensive and hard, but so what? Isn’t that what you do when a pandemic occurs?
You also point out we have a nursing shortage currently (we did before the pandemic as well). Isn’t that a reason why we should do this? Kill two birds with one stone … solve the prior nursing shortage with a training and hiring blitz.
Expanding hospitals, building new hospitals and training scores of new highly-skilled staff all takes many years. In addition to being extraordinarily expensive.
And then what? The pandemic ends and we have incredibly expensive facilities sitting empty (but still incurring maintenance costs forever) and a surplus of highly-trained staff who cannot find jobs because 98% of the time, we simply don't need any more capacity than we had in 2019.
Training staff does take time but new hospitals can be built quickly. The Chinese built an entire new hospital in 10 days. It probably isn't as good as a modern US hospital, but it's better than nothing.
The mitigation efforts have cost trillions of dollars in relief spending to make up for the economic damage they caused. Could we not have expanded capacity with one or two of the trillions we spent?
Makes you kinda wonder what kind of emergency this is? I mean they tried setting up fully staffed field hospitals in the beginning but they were closed—most without seeing a single patient.
Whatever the hell society is doing right now, it ain’t to protect hospital capacity. If hospitals were truly falling apart we’d have done something to fix them.
Because the Covid mortality risk for children is already with masks, compared to without masks for the flu.
Also, there are considerations other than specifically a child's death that are relevant here, like who that child can spread it to and what negative longterm effects surviving COVID-19 carry, neither of which are as pronounced or unknown as with the flu.
Children can spread the virus to adults, but adults who want to be vaccinated have been for months now. And since everyone will be exposed anyway it hardly matters who does the exposing.
How many children are there in the US? I'll let you pick the number you'd like to multiply by 0.00002, to get the number of children you're okay with killing.
It's easy to act morally superior and make cheap emotional arguments for when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions. All lives have value, but no life has infinite value. You can't seriously expect the majority to endure perpetual mandates and restrictions just to provide some limited, temporary protection to a small minority who are vulnerable due to risk factors like obesity.
And in the long run it won't make any difference anyway. Everyone will be exposed regardless of whether or not schoolchildren are subjected to mask mandates. So what's the point of continuing the charade?
I absolutely can expect the majority to endure a minor inconvenience, if that minority they're protecting is a thousand innocent children in a given year (you didn't pick a number, so I will, 78 million children).
And the point is to lower the curve, not avoid exposure.
But, again, you know all of this, you just don't care. Shameful.
Children actually have around a ten times higher chance of drowning than dying of COVID, so should we close all the pools and lakes? No we don't do that because we realize as humans that life is not without risk, in fact risk is what makes life worth living. I have children and worry every day something bad might happen to them but I let them take risk and live life because I know that's the only way that they will grow and be happy.
We do close all the pools and lakes to children who can't swim, or who swim unsupervised. We literally do not let children swim freely in random bodies of water. It's a huge deal; we hire lifeguards, teach them methods of operating safely in bodies of water, there's all kinds of equipment a child can wear while in the water to prevent drowning...
This isn't a great analogy for you, because it pretty thoroughly proves my point that masking is a very reasonable thing to do, compared to the litany of structure we put around children swimming in pools.
I was a lifeguard at a summer camp for christsake, what a terrible analogy. I literally worked to implement the many systems we use to keep kids safe in bodies of water.
I'm sure if a politician spouted such things they would just get tons of votes from parents. Honestly its kinda interesting to hear you say such a thing out loud because some of the more extreme voices on the anti-mask side have claimed that control is exactly whats going on which makes me wonder if you are not just trolling at this point (or maybe they were right all along).
> You can't seriously expect the majority to endure perpetual mandates and restrictions just to provide some limited, temporary protection to a small minority who are vulnerable due to risk factors like obesity.
Who is saying the mandates and restrictions are perpetual?
> Because the Covid mortality risk for children is already with masks, compared to without masks for the flu
This is false, which we know because we can measure the fatality rates for children in unmasked locales, and they do not differ from those in masked locales.
I've been pro-masking-in-schools for other reasons (including the practical reality that many schools would have had to shut down without it, since many teachers would have just quit—I know a lot of teachers, and whether you think it's right or wrong, that was going to happen, last school year especially, if precautions like masking, distancing, and long quarantine periods hadn't been enforced) but the risk specifically to kids under ~12 has been low enough not to trigger my "this is significantly-enough riskier than the average time a kid spends being driven around in a car in a given year, that I should worry about it" alarm pretty much throughout the pandemic. I looked into it when the first semi-reliable mortality numbers started to come in (I have some young kids, so of course I did) and it seemed well below nearly anyone's freak-out threshold, except for kids with other risk factors, some of whom probably shouldn't have been in school at all for any of this.
Right, but you aren't really someone who should have much of a say over this, and neither are any parents. The people most knowledgable about this topic are (though not universally) arriving at the conclusion that children should continue to wear masks.
Besides, wearing a mask is not exactly a heavy burden to bear. Yes, it's annoying, but the consequences of not doing so are also annoying, and in more than zero cases deadly.
It's such a low burden, that it's almost silly to think about not doing it, given the current situation.
Honestly, it just seems like parents are taking out their frustrations about the situation on other people who are also stuck in this situation. It's absolutely bananas, how acrimonious this has gotten, all because political actors saw a way to divide the country in a way that benefitted them.
> Besides, wearing a mask is not exactly a heavy burden to bear. Yes, it's annoying, but the consequences of not doing so are also annoying, and in more than zero cases deadly.
Sure, but tons of things are deadly in a non-zero number of cases, which most people give no thought to. Micromorts are everywhere.
I've been baffled at the strong anti-mask reaction and the way so many people've wanted to toss mask mandates and other measures out the second things even slightly improve, but if current trends continue (Omicron burning out, the virus generally getting less-bad, vaccinations continuing to be administered) I'll have (weakly, without really caring that much) joined team-no-mask-mandates-in-schools by next school year. My kids have been champs at wearing them but it's clear they're a (minor) problem in school, from the muffling effect if nothing else, and that compliance and good mask-wearing generally is pretty shit among younger kids anyway. I think we're probably past the cost/reward tipping point already, but again, I've tended to favor sticking with safety measures until we're extra sure, if only to avoid policy change whiplash.
OTOH I kind of love masks and hope it remains non-weird to go out in public in one. Two years of no illnesses in our house has been awesome.
There aren't tons of things you do that actively harm others, and when there are those things, they're regulated and compliance is enforced via legislation.
Wearing/not wearing a mask is not a heavy burden to bear, and by not doing it, you're increasing the net risk of everyone around you, in addition to your own.
That's what makes this different from wearing a helmet 24/7. But you knew that! Why is this the thing we can't do for one another, this small, one thing?!
I'm having trouble figuring out how you're not advocating for never-ending mask mandates, as long as risk reduction is greater than zero (which it would have been even before Covid). That's how these posts read. Is that what you're in favor of?
If I'm saying anything, I'm saying we should do what the collective expert institutions tell us (and stop listening to individuals, regardless of how qualified), and those institutions are generally sticking with the, "keep masking, kids!" message.
I'm not sure how you can read what I've written and not see how the risk is actually substantially higher than 0, and additionally to other people who have less of a choice about their comfort taking on that risk. I think you are fully aware I'm not suggesting we wear masks forever, but I'm curious about why you feel the need to present that strawman as my position. Is this generally an effective way to communicate for you?
>If I'm saying anything, I'm saying we should do what the collective expert institutions tell us (and stop listening to individuals, regardless of how qualified), and those institutions are generally sticking with the, "keep masking, kids!" message.
This just isn't true. Just the other day Sweden decided that they will not be recommending the vax for kids under 11 [1], and the UK has ended their mask mandates all together. The US is part of a select club that is actively ignoring what the data says about how effective these intrusive measures really are. There's other examples from all over the world and their covid outcomes are better that the US, largely because so many in the US were simply unhealthy, out of shape, and fat which weakens your immune system.
Taking your strategy will do much to weaken the general populous' trust in these institutions.
The CDC does. [0]. So does the Mayo Clinic [1]. So does the Cleveland Clinic [2]. So does Johns Hopkins [3]. So does the American Academy of Pediatrics [4].
And the WHO does suggest many children wear masks. [5]
If you don't trust even one of these institutions over your own judgement, you are failing to participate successfully in society.
I'm making a point that the US is unique in this regard, and few other countries are being this draconian about masking kids. TFA notes that the CDC's own data don't lead to the conclusion that these measures do much of anything, and the measures actively ignore the other potential developmental effects on e.g. language processing. Those clinic articles (they're articles, written by what looks like some random communications staffer, not official guidance or studies) just reference CDC guidance. If you look at what the WHO is actually recommending - ignoring how piss poor their guidance has been thus far - it's way more nuanced than you are implying.
I don't really care to reiterate the CDC's own studies cited in TFA, as you and many others seem convinced that we should be masking indefinitely, even after the pandemic "ends".
>If you don't trust even one of these institutions over your own judgement, you are failing to participate successfully in society.
Okay then cast me out? What a weird sentiment. Blind faith in institutions seems unwise.
Firstly, who said anything about faith, let alone blind faith? These institutions are constantly on the forefront of public health policy, and have an overwhelming number of credentials and positive track records that justify trusting them to speak accurately. There is no faith here, only earned trust.
Secondly, you yourself said the US is uniquely vulnerable. Are you now saying it’s not?
You can try to strawman all you like, the unavoidable fact is that the institutions with the most credibility in the world are speaking with one voice: mask your children before sending them back to school, and that schools should enforce mask wearing to reduce covid transmission rates.
It's not a straw man, I've been noting that risk to nearly all kids, especially young ones, has always been so low that any amount of effort or expense to reduce it would have been questionable (but I was still pro- various measures, including mask mandates, to protect other people in and connected to schools and students, to reduce community rates of infection, while still letting us go back to in-person school—that was always by far the stronger argument for, specifically, school mask mandates) which is just true unless you've got some figures at hand that look very different from any I've seen, and that at some point—which we are likely at least approaching—the broader risk and the amount of mitigation we gain from school mask mandates drops below the level of being worth any attention at all, baring some drastic change in the current trajectory of the pandemic.
But you keep coming back like that's an unreasonable position. What's left is... what? The conclusion I came to, right?
> Is this generally an effective way to communicate for you?
I'm just trying to understand WTF you're getting at. I don't have a clue what you think I'm trying to do.
Why are you ignoring the multiple times I've talked about the effects that aren't directly related to the children? They're carriers too, and that matters, on top of everything else.
And the institutions I trust do not agree with you that we're "rapidly approaching" any such loss of value from masking in schools. That's just straight up wrong.
> Why are you ignoring the multiple times I've talked about the effects that aren't directly related to the children? They're carriers too, and that matters, on top of everything else.
How is posting that exact thing—so, agreeing with you—more explicitly ("to protect other people in and connected to schools and students, to reduce community rates of infection") than you have until this very post (it's at best implied in all your other posts, from what I can tell, and I just re-read them to be sure—but maybe you had that on your mind and it just didn't come across strongly?) ignoring that point? It's far and away the strongest argument for masking in schools.
> And the institutions I trust do not agree with you that we're "rapidly approaching" any such loss of value from masking in schools. That's just straight up wrong.
We better be, because I'm pretty sure they're going away before long no matter what either of us want (again, barring a large change in course for the pandemic). Shit, around here they already did drop them for a couple weeks right before the Omicron surge and schools had to scramble to bring them back to avoid having to shut down completely (again: man, I hate the insistence on removing safety measures ASAP, it's been proven a stupid idea every single time it's happened so far in my city, yet people, including e.g. school administrators, keep going "OK looks better this week, we should start removing our safety measures"). Our city-wide mandates are currently gone and were being largely ignored for about a month before they were removed. It borders on miraculous that schools have been successful at keeping mandates in place as long and consistently as they have—and if not for the fact that they'd have ended up horrendously under-staffed and had to shut down without them, I absolutely don't think they'd have worked as hard at it as they have. Admin hates pissing off parents, even if it's only a few of them, and the anti-maskers have been the angriest and most-active participants in these goings-on. From what I can see the (very credible) threat of mass teacher resignations and walk-outs (plus, you know, just the risk of too many of them being sick at once) are the only reason mask mandates in schools persisted for any amount of time at all (and, again, I'm glad they have!) outside maybe the "bluest" of "blue" strongholds, but I don't think that pressure's gonna keep up much longer.
The high school in my conservative county has reinstated mask mandates, and it hasn't really been very dramatic at all. Most parents generally get it, but I live in a flyover state so nobody cares that it's working fine here.
Yeah, they all kinda had to with Omicron because it's so damn contagious that even with the reduced 5-day quarantine guidelines and drastic reductions in the circumstances under which one must quarantine (which changes I'm about 90% sure are BS from a pure public health perspective, and just a practical-minded compromise aimed at preventing a de facto shutdown from having half the damn country in quarantine at once in the Omicron surge) some local districts were seeing days when they were short hundreds of subs to cover for all the teachers who were out.
[EDIT] BTW, no hard feelings, I genuinely wasn't trying to piss you off. Communication is hard. Sorry if it sucked this time. [EDIT EDIT] LOL, and that phrasing was too wishy-washy. Sorry if I sucked at it, this time.
The CDC does. [0]. So does the Mayo Clinic [1]. So does the Cleveland Clinic [2]. So does Johns Hopkins [3]. So does the American Academy of Pediatrics [4].
And the WHO does suggest many children wear masks. [5]
If you don't trust even one of these institutions over your own judgement, you are failing to participate successfully in society.
> except for kids with other risk factors, some of whom probably shouldn't have been in school at all for any of this
You're likely getting into ADA territory there. Masking during a pandemic to permit at-risk kids to continue to go to school sounds very much like a "reasonable accommodation" of the sort schools are required by law to provide.
> You're likely getting into ADA territory there. Masking during a pandemic to permit at-risk kids to continue to go to school sounds very much like a "reasonable accommodation" of the sort schools are required by law to provide.
I agree it is a reasonable accommodation, but also cannot imagine sending my own kid to in-person school if they were one of the rare high-risk kids, especially before vaccination was an option. Masking helps over a population, absolutely, but if you're a particular person who's prone to and weak against infection, the way it's been spreading in school even with masking—yikes. Masks and the (mostly lame and questionable, for the simple reason that doing better would have meant building new schools—I saw some hilariously pointless and even alarmingly counterproductive guidelines forwarded from teachers I'm friends with) distancing practices aren't anywhere near sufficient for that case, IMO.
OTOH, lots of people don't have the option to stay home and watch a high-risk kid. So masking it is (again, I am mostly very in favor of it!) but man, that sucks for those kids and their parents.
More children dealing with Covidism (it's a cult at this point) enforced in schools are going to off themselves from the psychological abuse of being denied a social life than will be saved by enforcing cloth mask policy.
Um, it says "can" and not "do". It says "can" because it depends entirely on the person wearing it. Trained professionals in a short term controlled environment, I am sure they work great. Kids in a school, not worth it. The neglect in "frequent hand-washing", "physical distancing", and other habits are going to lay waste to any positive impact the masks may have. No one is going to spend the time to instill the necessary habits to make masks worthwhile in school.
Who's going to teach them? Parents aren't going to have time or will miss critical areas. Teachers won't want to do it. If teachers do attempt it, it would likely be weeks or months of education down the drain since they'll be constantly taking breaks to correct students one by one.
No, no it would not. Most of it would be breaking thoughtless behavior. Johnny you have your fingers in your eyes again. Joan, did you wash your hands before and after smearing that lip gloss on? Etc...
It is all pretty much worthless considering all the unmasked children gathered for lunch.
Sadly they are not just killing children but children are clearly one of the most important vectors carrying the virus from family to family. Childcare and schools are the super nodes in an otherwise socially distanced network. Any effort to slow down the spread in these places will be multiplied across the whole population. Considering the breakdown of medical care system not doing anything right now is irresponsible.
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...