This is becoming a sick joke.
This is becoming a sick joke.
A re we really going to keep masking children? Temperatures are rising, kids are playing outdoors, and our public-health experts — including Dr. Anthony Fauci — are suggesting that schoolchildren will still be wearing masks when schools reopen in August and September this year.
This is becoming a sick joke. As vaccination rates climb over 60 and 70 percent in the most populous counties of the United States, the risk of any single person getting COVID-19 is dropping precipitously. The risk for children is practically nonexistent.
This week in Hauppauge on Long Island, groups of parents started organizing to demand that Governor Andrew Cuomo “unmask our kids.” Some school districts in New York not only require kids to wear masks but still have plastic barriers built into desks, despite the CDC’s dropping any recommendation for these and some studies suggesting that they could make COVID spread worse because they block the free movement of air. But there is no significant spread at schools because young children do not usually develop serious COVID-19 infections and do not spread the disease.
Even during major surges, the prevalence of COVID-19 among the school-aged population remained just one-third of that of the surrounding population. That is, even though schools were likely the local institution that mixed people from the most households together, they were the least likely to be a source of infection for a community. Subsequent reviews of the data and literature produced on juvenile cases of COVID-19 show that the already-low rates of hospitalization among children are likely overstated by up to 40 percent.
And yet even as it was relaxing mask requirements for adults, New York recently added entirely new mandates for day-care centers, requiring all children over two years of age to be masked all day. Indoors or out. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy says he’s open-minded about dropping New Jersey’s mask requirements in schools by the time the academic year begins. But not committed. Close to 90 percent of the membership of the American Federation of Teachers is vaccinated, and yet that group is demanding the continued use of masks until children under 12 can be vaccinated. Why?
The science is actually overwhelming. Three medical experts, writing in the Washington Post last week, argued that it is time to return children to normal, regardless of their vaccine status:
This low risk for children nearly vanishes as cases plummet. As we saw in Israel and Britain, vaccinating adults indirectly protects children. The same trend is evident here in the United States: Adult vaccination has lowered COVID-19 incidence among children by 50 percent in the past four weeks. On average, fewer than 0.01 percent of Americans are currently infected, and the chance of an asymptomatic person transmitting to a close contact is about 0.7 percent. That yields a scant 0.00007 percent chance that any close contact will transmit infection to a child. If the contact is outdoors, the risk appears to be more than 1,000 times lower.
But it’s almost not enough to cite these numbers, which are overwhelming. One has to go to simple common sense. We were almost all taught as children that disposable tissues are good because handkerchiefs are unhygienic and disgusting. But for young children, toddlers in particular, the cotton-jersey masks that they most often wear in schools are just that, a handkerchief pulled over their mouth and nose constantly. They often are disgusting at the end of a day of use.
And so we have two facts staring us in the face. (1) Kids — even unvaccinated children — are not in serious danger from COVID-19. It is a disease that is less dangerous to them than the flu. (2) Masks, particularly the kind of cloth-jersey masks that are worn at schools, are not just ineffective at stopping COVID but may be worse as a mitigation effort against COVID than no mask at all.
And so all we are doing with requiring masks in schools is needlessly cultivating the sense of danger in our children when they should be focused on learning and making friends.
It was totally reasonable in the early days of the pandemic — when people thought the case-fatality rate could be as high as 3 percent and the mechanism for spread was unknown — to shut down schools. But we’ve learned so much in the past 15 months. Our kids may sometimes wonder how it is that they can master entirely new fields of math in a single school year — but the adults who run the entire world can’t figure out that a 0.00007 percent risk is not worth worrying about.