Kyle Smith has written eloquently about the negative effects of masking children in schools. Reality continues to add evidence to his diagnosis. Surveying the available information (and noting that the U.S. is something of a global outlier in its insistence on masking children in schools), Vinay Prasad (associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco) asserts in Tablet that:
. . . most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity or trajectory of the virus. The loss to children remains difficult to capture in hard data, but will likely become clear in the years to come.
Less forgivable is the decision we’ve made as a society to shift the anxieties of adults onto the youngest members of society, who count on us to defend their interests before our own. It is thanks to the nature of this particular virus, rather than the foresight of American institutions or adults, that COVID has been relatively impotent against children. The majority of kids who have been infected have recovered without sequelae. And yet we continue to impose the most harmful and onerous restrictions on the youngest among us. While we purportedly do it to protect other age groups, empirical analysis suggests, for instance, that school closures in a given community have done nothing to slow the spread among the elderly in the same community.
But hey, at least some kids are in school, albeit masked. Meanwhile, in Flint., Mich., schools have just decided to go remote “indefinitely.” Per MLive:
Flint students will remain at home indefinitely starting next week, as the school district today announced that it will not be returning to the classroom on Jan. 24.
The decision to continue virtual learning comes from Superintendent Kevelin Jones, who made the call to go virtual to begin the new year after winter break.
“While this decision was not made easily, it is necessary for the greater health of our community,” Jones wrote in a Wednesday, Jan. 19 statement to parents. “We know this is not an easy time for many across our district and we want you to know that you are not alone.”
There are a lot of parents right now, particularly among the most vulnerable in our society, who probably do feel alone in their concern for their children’s actual well-being. Certainly it seems their schools no longer care.