Bring Kids Out of the COVID Fog Next

Y esterday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally updated its guidance on mask-wearing outdoors. Unless you’re at a crowded event, the CDC advises that you don’t have to wear masks outdoors.

This is bringing our most important public-health body up to date with science from exactly a year ago. While states such as California were still arresting people for paddleboarding by themselves in the ocean in the name of public health, a small mountain of scientific evidence was piling up that COVID-19 does not transmit outdoors and that it does transmit among people who are sedentary and have a vitamin D deficiency. In most places in the United States, this led people to not ever wear their masks outdoors. But major urban centers developed a norm of constant outdoor mask-wearing, even as masks came off in indoor-dining situations. Only now, with the overwhelming majority of the vulnerable population vaccinated, has respectable liberal opinion started to nudge public-health authorities to make official what anyone following the scientific consensus already knew.

There is something else we figured out last year, and just a few weeks after we figured out that outdoor transmission was not a serious risk: COVID is not a danger to otherwise healthy children, and children are not efficient spreaders of the disease. This is especially true of young children under 12. And yet, surveys show an appallingly low percentage of schools are even open full time for in-person instruction.

Fears of a giant surge of Kawasaki disease among children did not materialize last year. In late April 2020, papers started to emerge showing that children were not super spreaders.

By May, epidemiologists could not find any evidence that children were causing serious outbreaks of COVID. The preliminary evidence from 700 scientific papers suggested that children had much smaller viral loads and were less likely to transmit because they were not symptomatic. The literature seemed to even suggest that size matters. Morbidly obese adults had a capacity for larger viral loads than did fit adults. Initially, public-health experts from Canada to France expressed their doubts about the appropriateness of masking children.

As schools reopened, with masks, distancing measures, and health screeners, the prevalence of COVID-19 among the school-aged population remained one-third of that of the population around schools. But it was also clear to teachers, students, and parents that children who exercised the option of in-person learning were doing much better academically, developmentally, and emotionally than kids who were stuck with remote learning.

As the pandemic evolved, it became clear that infants and older teenagers had significantly higher risk profiles than toddlers and young children. But fears that emerging variants of COVID-19 were much more dangerous or likely to spread among children have been overblown. The British variant that did circulate more among teenagers only did so because schools were almost the only institution that was open in the United Kingdom at the time of the spread.

Changing CDC recommendations for schools have had a guesswork feel. As the horrible developmental, academic, and mental-health costs of closed schools impressed themselves on the public, the CDC changed its recommendation of distancing from six feet to three feet. It also removed recommendations for physical barriers — Plexiglas around desks.

But, we are now at a crucial point. Schools have proven relatively effective at controlling the spread. And now teachers have been vaccinated or have had priority for vaccination offered to them. If there was a vulnerable population in schools, it was the teachers and administrators. If we believe that the vaccines are effective at preventing the worst outcomes from COVID-19, then the already-low danger of schools has been dramatically lowered still.

It’s time to let young children from pre-K to at least 12 years of age take off their masks, ditch any remaining Plexiglas, and dramatically relax distancing guidelines for them. It’s easy to quantify the damage that school interruptions have done to their academic development. And so health bodies should encourage schools to reopen, but the cautious naturally ask: What harm is it doing? And by the way, kids are resilient.

The answer is we don’t know, beyond the anecdotal. However, common sense tells us it is not healthy to have constant reminders and onerous precautions against extraordinarily unlikely dangers. If someone suggested that teachers wear bullet-proof vests and be required to open-carry a gun in school, to defend against the real but tiny risk of a shooting event, everyone would know that such an environment would feel paranoid. An average student is more likely to die by participating in school sports than die in a mass school shooting.

Similarly, by putting masks on two- to ten-year-olds, we are fitting upon the most intimate part of their body a constant reminder that they may be in danger, or that they are a danger to others. This will inevitably have some effect on their mental model of the world, of the security they feel in their schools, and their willingness and ability to develop friendships or cultivate a rapport with their teachers. Instead of using “kids are resilient” as an excuse to off-load the anxiety adults feel onto children, we need to acknowledge that kids are resilient from COVID and that this intervention is simply not justified by the science.

Therefore it is unjust.