A member of the Montgomery County, Md. school board argued during a Thursday meeting that school mask mandates should be extended regardless of their efficacy on the grounds that they create a comforting illusion of safety for students and faculty.
“The last thing I want is for schools to be a source of anxiety for our students and it feels like making masks optional because of all the messaging, especially at the beginning of the pandemic that my mask not only protects me, it protects my community,” Hana O’Looney said.
She said that schools should dismiss the statistics showing that masks, especially the cloth variety common in public schools, don’t impede the transmission of the now-dominant Omicron variant.
“That’s still a lingering sentiment, regardless of what data says, perception is reality for students and families. I’m really afraid that if we get rid of the mask mandate it’s going to cause a lot of fear for our students and families,” she said.
O’Looney’s comments come as multiple states that were notorious for strict pandemic protocols, such as New Jersey and Connecticut, relax their masking restrictions to reflect waning case and hospitalization rates. Her proposal is also likely to conflict with a new CDC advisory to be released Friday, which will allow about 70 percent of Americans to remove their masks indoors, including inside schools, two officials briefed on the plan told ABC News.
Under the new guidance, over half of U.S. counties will be designated “low” or “medium” risk for the virus, due to the low rate of Covid-19 hospitalizations, meaning residents of these areas can un-mask in most indoor settings.
Three public-health experts wrote an article in the Atlantic recently explaining how a randomized trial in Denmark found that masks had no significant effect on transmission. A study in Bangladesh found that surgical masks had some impact on reducing spread but the sample size didn’t include children. Similarly, a Brown University study of schools in New York, Massachusetts, and Florida didn’t find any correlation between student case numbers and mask mandates.
Mandatory masking exacts a steep social and academic cost, parents across the country are pointing out, evident by the spike in youth speech therapy enrollment for developmental delays, peer bullying, and mental health problems among children. Many toddlers have had no lived experience without masks, which has many parents worried about potential psychological repercussions.