We Will Regret Masking Kids

N ew York governor Kathy Hochul has issued a new mask mandate covering just about every child over two years of age at almost every sort of institutional activity that two-year-old children can participate in.

If my kid coughs on you, you’ll live. I promise. I know because I try to avoid masking them whenever I can. And you would know them by the trail of the living behind them.

Almost every decision I’ve made about my children in the past six months has involved avoiding masking requirements. We wanted to reunite our children with their granddad in Ireland. He could not fly here to visit them, owing to an outdated and now entirely stupid American travel ban on Europe. But we could fly to him in Ireland — and why wouldn’t we? — and Ireland has never masked young children in any environment. Ireland has been very strict about COVID rules, however; adults regularly masked in many indoor settings, but young children never did.

Despite pressure from the prestige media, public-health authorities in Ireland again recommended against children wearing masks in school this year, even with the Delta variant in Ireland. And they are going even further by backing off mandatory quarantines. Why? Because they are following the evidence.

There is evidence everywhere — if only the authorities would consult it — that children are not efficient transmitters of COVID-19. A study of 150 schools in the U.K. showed that we do not have to quarantine students who come into contact with other COVID-positive students. We can just test them, and so long as they stay negative, they don’t spread the coronavirus to their classmates. I expect that even the testing regimen will begin to go away in Europe.

When we booked tickets to Ireland, we saw that American-based airlines such as United required all children two years and older to wear masks. We imagined our two-year-old son fussing with them, and us getting kicked off the plane. This wasn’t fanciful: An American Airlines flight was recently turned around and a family kicked off because a young child in the middle of an asthma attack was using his inhaler rather than wearing his mask. We booked Aer Lingus instead. We wore masks, but at least the kids were spared. The flight attendants treated our children with sympathy and understanding, rather than hostility. Everywhere in Ireland the kids were spared from masks. And guess what? All their close contacts in Ireland are still living and breathing. More distant and incidental contacts were fine, too — Ireland’s contact tracing was more extensive than anything in the U.S., and we received no calls.

It’s not just travel. The mask factor has featured in our decisions about our kids’ after-school activities, where or whether they’d attend school, their weekend pursuits, even which houses they’d visit. And I’m glad. The more that kids have a normal life in which they interact with adults and other kids outside our home — seeing one another’s faces — the happier they are. It’s important for children to see and be seen by others.

Young unvaccinated children are in far less danger from COVID than vaccinated adults are. The adult world is starting to allow itself more and more events without anti-COVID interventions, so of course we should allow the same for children. Then again, at the Met Gala and in many restaurants around the world, masks are becoming a de facto class signifier. Servers are expected to wear them because masks signal their commitment to keep the clientele safe. But the patrons don’t have to wear them, presumably because they are paying. If the images of masked servants make us step back in disgust, so should images of masked children standing aside unmasked adults.

We will regret doing this. None of the experience in Europe suggests that masking children is an effective intervention against COVID. The coronavirus is such a small risk for children, according to a mounting body of data, that some public-health authorities are recommending against vaccinating children. And we have lots of studies showing that the cloth masks that are imposed in schools and day cares do little or nothing to prevent the spread of respiratory disease.

We have no good medical or public-health-related reasons to impose universal masking on children, and we have commonsense reasons for not imposing them. But one factor is the most persuasive of all: our simple duty to reality. It is perverse to treat children as if they are in more danger than they are. We shouldn’t let ourselves off the hook and in years hence excuse ourselves by claiming that we didn’t know enough. We know enough to stop this right now.