Playwright Oliver Goldsmith once noted that “every absurdity has a champion to defend it.” The sustained, inane, post-pandemic hysteria may have found its champions in the universities of our nation’s capital, and beyond.
Georgetown and American Universities have chosen to continue their policies of mandatory masking in indoor instructional settings, including classrooms and laboratories, on the main and medical-school campuses. Yet at Georgetown, masks remain optional in hallways and informal gatherings, such as libraries and study rooms. What’s the difference in risk between those two settings? Don’t bother asking.
Nonetheless, it’s worth mentioning that research from the Lancet suggests that the Omicron variant’s transmission rate is so high that even the most stringent mitigation regime will do little to impede its advance. So maintaining masking requirements, particularly in some but not all settings, is only delaying the inevitability of a young, healthy person catching a disease that has an infinitesimal chance of rendering him or her seriously ill, at a tremendous social cost.
Public-health officials at schools where masking is still required are operating under the assumption that masking students prevents elderly at-risk faculty members from contracting the virus. But there is a dearth of data supporting this premise. One of the only contact-tracing studies looking at transmission rates in college classrooms concluded that the risk of a university faculty member acquiring Covid-19 from a positive student was minuscule. The time has obviously come to let students use their discretion to determine how to protect themselves best.
Two and a half years into the pandemic, after the CDC dropped its quarantine and social-distancing recommendations, sustaining mask mandates makes little sense. The adverse effects of this retrograde policy on students’ education and mental health far outweigh any potential benefits. With the purveyor of doom, Dr. Fauci, on his way out the door, and 70 percent of Americans supporting the proposition that we need to “accept that Covid is here to stay and get on with our lives,” when will these schools catch on to the fact that they’re behind the times?