Coronavirus: Thread

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> Government hides the truth, spreads FUD, investigators say...

Not supported by Science: Government




Science Shaky On School Mask Mandates While Harms Ignored

https://www.theepochtimes.com/science-shaky-on-school-mask-mandates-while-harms-ignored_3999780.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
https://downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/AAP%20and%20CHA%20-%20Children%20and%20COVID-19%20State%20Data%20Report%209.9%20FINAL.pdf
https://apnews.com/article/health-religion-coronavirus-pandemic-c58f8577203b8316299f9fa90ebf7578
https://www.theepochtimes.com/australia-imposes-new-restrictions-on-prescribing-ivermectin-for-covid-19_3992244.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/ohio-judge-orders-hospital-to-treat-ventilated-covid-19-patient-with-ivermectin_3972447.html
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cdc-to-recommend-everyone-in-k-12-schools-wear-masks-regardless-of-vaccination-status/
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2021/7/9/22570068/new-cdc-guidance-schools-masks
https://hms.harvard.edu/magazine/racism-medicine/children-covid-19-spread
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2778940
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2771181
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-pdf/72/12/e1146/38646973/ciaa1825.pdf
https://www.theepochtimes.com/giving-the-right-name-to-the-virus-causing-a-worldwide-pandemic-2_3277200.html
https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2021/08/just-how-dangerous-is-the-delta-variant/
https://nypost.com/2021/07/08/dont-buy-the-hysteria-the-delta-variant-is-actually-less-dangerous/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19196383/
https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Executive-Order-21-175.pdf
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.19.21257467v1.full.pdf
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e1.htm
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/m20-6817
https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/seriously-take-the-masks-off-kids-now/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/university-of-florida-lab-finds-dangerous-pathogens-on-childrens-face-masks_3865300.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/facemasks-for-covid-pose-pollution-problems-experts_3953149.html
https://labtestsonline.org/news/unusual-spike-rsv-cases-summer
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8353058_Wearing_Masks_in_a_Pediatric_Hospital_Developing_Practical_Guidelines
https://www.aier.org/article/great-barrington-declaration-scientists-with-gov-desantis-in-florida/
https://twitter.com/angrybklynmom/status/1428091248930340864
https://justthenews.com/nation/science/satpro-mask-pediatrics-group-denies-scrubbing-resources-importance-faces-child
https://www.heraldextra.com/news/2021/apr/15/utah-parents-united-speaks-out-against-mask-mandate-for-schools/

Should children be required to wear masks at school?

A review of the costs and benefits, including some of the latest
science, does not add much to the case for mandating school masks.

First, some basics... The risk of death from COVID-19 among
schoolchildren is very, very low.

How Low?

A Nature study estimating the COVID-19 infection fatality rate (IFR),
or proportion of those infected who die, found IFRs of just 0.001
percent in children aged 5–9, and IFRs well below 0.01 percent in all
those aged 19 and under.

That’s less than one in 10,000 among teenagers and less than one in
100,000 in 5- to 9-year-old children.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has advocated masking
children aged 2 and up, found that only 460 children had died of
COVID-19 between late May 2020 and Sept. 9, 2021 across 45 states, New
York City, Guam, and Puerto Rico—0.08 percent of the total number of
deaths they counted.

Looking again across multiple states, the AAP found that COVID-19
cases among children have surged in recent weeks, growing by 10
percent from 4,797,683 to 5,292,837 between Aug. 26 and Sept. 9—a
trend that could be related to the start of in-person schooling.

Yet the AAP’s own data shows children are just 0.9 percent of COVID-19
hospitalizations, a rate on par with previous weeks, and down from
reported hospitalization rates of 3.8 percent in mid-2020.

With all that in mind, what are the benefits of masking children?

According to the AAP, those benefits include the “protection of
unvaccinated students from COVID-19,” as well as “reduc[ed]
transmission.”

Yet as described above, COVID-19’s risks for schoolchildren have been,
and remain, extremely low.

What’s more, vaccines have been made widely available or are even
mandated among teachers, who belong to age groups more vulnerable to
COVID-19 than children—and despite efforts to restrict access to
ivermectin, individuals may still be able to obtain the drug,
identified as an “essential medicine” by the World Health
Organization, as well as other potential therapeutics.

Like the AAP, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now
recommends universal masking in schools, a change from its previous
stance that vaccinated students and teachers do not have to wear
masks. (Neither the AAP nor the CDC mention natural immunity in their
school masking guidance).

They, too, point to transmission as a justification for universal
indoor masking, citing the highly transmissible Delta variant.

Concerns about transmission come down to two questions:

        First, how much is widespread COVID-19 transmission driven by
children in school, and

        Second, how well do masks and mask mandates limit transmission?

While some scientists have provided evidence that children might play
a significant role in community spread, researchers generally agree
that children, and especially young children, are not the primary
drivers of it.

An observational study in the Journal of the American Medical
Association suggested that children up to the age of 9 attending
school were not major contributors to COVID-19 spread, though the
study’s findings on teenagers were more equivocal.

A 2020 meta-analysis, or analysis of multiple studies, on COVID-19
susceptibility among young children and adolescents concluded
susceptibility was lower in those groups than in adults and offered
“weak evidence” that they play a lesser role in population-level
transmission.

More recently, a 2021 meta-analysis on COVID-19 transmission clusters
concluded that children infected in school “are unlikely to spread
SARS-CoV-2 to their cohabiting family members.”

While the Delta variant appears to be more contagious, driving a rise
in CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus-related cases and deaths, many
have argued that it is less deadly than the original Alpha strain.

This would be in line with the hypothesized trade-off between
transmission and virulence, which suggests that pathogens evolve in
the direction of spreading farther while also becoming less damaging
to their hosts.

The effectiveness of masks, and mask mandates, in schools is also a
matter of dispute, with mask mandates for students apparently lacking
clear support.

In his July 30 executive order against mask mandates in Florida
schools, Gov. Ron DeSantis argued that “forcing students to wear masks
lacks a well-grounded scientific justification,” citing a 2021
preprint that found no correlation between mask mandates and COVID-19
case rates among students and faculty across schools in Florida, New
York, and Massachusetts.

Yet the authors of that study stressed that their research was limited
to just three states, meaning their conclusions may not apply
elsewhere. They also emphasized that the masking variation they
identified in Florida schools could make their findings “even less
generalizable to all U.S. students.”

A 2020 report by the CDC itself on elementary schools in Georgia noted
that “COVID-19 incidence was 37% lower in schools that required
teachers and staff members to use masks.”

Crucially, however, the CDC found that mask mandates for students did
not have a statistically significant impact on COVID-19 incidence.

Here too, the study’s authors noted some limitations to their work;
notably, their findings were based on self-reporting, and
investigators did not directly examine whether people were using
masks.

What About Masks More Generally?

An early randomized controlled trial of 4,862 adult participants from
Denmark did not find that surgical masks reduced COVID-19 infection,
although the authors noted that some results were “inconclusive.”

On Sept. 1, however, researchers released a working paper detailing a
cluster-randomized trial of mask promotion across communities in rural
Bangladesh, which involved 600 villages and more than 300,000
individuals, that appeared to support masking.

After surveying “all reachable participants” and testing blood from
symptomatic individuals, the researchers linked mask promotion to a
slight reduction in symptomatic COVID-19 infections.

Yet similar to the Danish study, the Bangladesh study was explicitly
intended to examine mask-wearing among those “who appear to be 18
years or older”—not the young children or adolescents to whom school
mask mandates apply.

What, then, are the potential costs of requiring children to be masked
at school?

An obvious one is cleanliness.

    “We were almost all taught as children that disposable tissues are
good because handkerchiefs are unhygienic and disgusting,” wrote
Michael Brendan Dougherty in an article for National Review Online.
“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.”

Unsurprisingly, children’s masks may be a breeding ground for bacteria
and other microorganisms, some of them potentially dangerous.

One recent analysis from the University of Florida revealed that most
masks worn by children in 90-degree-Fahrenheit heat were contaminated
with parasites, fungi, and bacteria, including a virus known to cause
a fatal systemic disease in deer and cattle.

Masks, particularly disposable masks, are also harmful to the
environment. With billions of single-use masks being thrown out every
day, researchers believe that discarded masks and respirators are
adding to plastic pollution—a problem to which school mask mandates
can only contribute.

Masking and other interventions may also have knock-on effects related
to the frequency of other respiratory diseases.

The recent, out-of-season spike in pediatric hospitalizations for
respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been tied to the COVID-19
response, with infants and young children who would have otherwise
been exposed to RSV at an earlier age now falling ill from it.

Masking may also have significant psychological and developmental
effects on children.

A 2004 article on masking in a pediatric hospital, authored long
before the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the scientific debate on masking,
expanded on some of the psychological hazards for children.

    “Imagine the impact of a hospital filled with “faceless” people on
a young child. Who is smiling? Who is frowning? How do I recognize my
doctor? How does my nurse recognize me? Why is everyone so scared of
me and my germs?…”

    “When wearing masks, goggles and/or face shields, non-verbal
communication is impaired. Subtle facial cues are absent or can be
misread and lip-reading is impossible.”

More recently, in a roundtable with Governor DeSantis and other
scientists, Stanford professor Dr. Jay Battacharya argued that masking
children is both medically unnecessary and “developmentally
inappropriate.”

    “I mean, how do you teach a child to read with a face mask on
Zoom? I think children develop by watching other people,” Battacharya
said.

The controversy over the developmental impact of masking children has
even impacted the AAP.

In August, Internet users unearthed an AAP webpage emphasizing the
developmental importance of face time between parents and babies that
had apparently been removed from the organization’s website, along
with other AAP webpages describing how babies and young children learn
through looking at faces.

The AAP responded by explaining that the web pages disappeared as a
result of website migration, telling Just the News that “some content
areas, including Early Brain and Child Development, are still being
organized before they go live on the new platform.”

Finally, the practice of mandating masks could be argued to compromise
individual and parental autonomy.

Advocacy groups such as Utah Parents United have spoken out against
school mask mandates, saying that they undermine parental rights and
are unnecessary for such a low-risk group, particularly given the
availability of vaccines to adult teachers and staff.

With all that we know so far, how can we answer these parents?

If the benefits of mask mandates do not outweigh the costs, it’s hard
to find fault with opposition, or at least skepticism—especially for
young schoolchildren, who are at the lowest risk of serious illness
and death, and who may be most vulnerable to the uncertain and
understudied costs of universal masking and other stringent measures.