I would also point to Philippe Lemoine's piece - what do things look like five, or twenty years from now (you know, that question public health never seems to ask itself anymore)? His answer was, COVID is always here but it's no longer serious. Why is it no longer serious? Because people are first infected when they are young and it is harmless, setting them on a path of lifelong immunity during which they are constantly reinfected, but it is never serious until they are old and weak. Eventually, he said, the only people who will be vaccinated are the elderly.
So if that is the eventual situation, and a central piece of that eventual situation is "kids get infected when young but that's fine because the disease is nearly harmless to them and that helps protect them for the rest of their lives"... then why are we fanatically attempting to prevent them from being infected now?
I would not be opposed to a mask mandate for unvaccinated kids in high school, but that's about it. My kids elementary school is making kids wear masks full time, including outside at recess. I'd pull them out except that my wife is a teacher at the school and that would be really awkward for everyone. It's ridiculous.
Masks in high school are a bit of a different beast since the risk calculation changes (older kids are higher risk than younger kids) and the nature of the negative effects of long-term masking changes as children get older.
Exactly. They're really two different issues. Unfortunately the debate is often just "schools" and districts are imposing the same restrictions across the board.
One thing I’m really curious about is the effect of masks on kids psychologically. Isn’t facial recognition super important for child development? I think you could potentially argue that masks are not neutral, they have a negative effect on kids. This was one of the few articles I could find… https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/well/family/how-children-learn-to-recognize-faces.html
I intentionally avoided the topic of the downsides of masks on kids specifically because that is a massive and contentious subject that I thought would distract from my main thesis.
This is a very loosely held position, but I think it's incredibly hard to know the long-term consequences for masking kids without simply doing it and finding out. That is an awfully risky game to play and I'm a little dispirited that so many people are happy to play it so casually.
I would love to see a clear eyed take on the downsides - I've come to believe there is significantly more risk to the downside than our national conversation allows.
As an aside - I find it distressing that our Public Health infrastructure has produced so little, and such poor, analysis surrounding the masking questions.
Thanks for another good post with actual data on this.
Anyone want to indulge in some baseless speculation on why it might be that masks do seem to have an impact for adults but not for kids? Some ideas:
- Kids don't keep them on as well as adults.
- If it's aerosol transmission, when you're sitting in a classroom all day with the same kids, whatever virions they're breathing out are going to diffuse around given enough time, regardless of the mask. Since teachers see each other for shorter periods during the day, masking may still help block some of their transmission between one another.
My speculation would be viral load. All of the following factors increase either the viral load or the duration of transmissibility:
- Size (adults are physically larger and so they will contain more viruses)
- Obesity (fat cells store more Sars-COV-2 than other tissues)
- Comorbidities, especially diabetes (increase uptake and take longer to clear)
- Age (older people take longer to clear out infections)
All those factors combined mean you simply can't compare a 300-pound, 50-year old, pre-diabetic vaccinated man to a 75-pound, 12-year old, healthy, unvaccinated old girl in terms of the risk of spread. They're not in the same ballpark.
But the bottom line is that they're already at extremely low risk anyway. Lowering your risk of dying from falling down the stairs is going to be very hard to measure and/or perceive because it's already so low.
I think you’ve misread the CDC study of mitigation policies in Georgia schools. Methodologically it is fine, IMO. The cited 37% reduction is due to mask mandates for unvaccinated faculty and staff, however. Buried in the report, and not mentioned in the summary, is the fact that mask mandates for students in these Georgia schools show zero effect on reducing incidents of COVID infection. It is the widest study available, covering over 90K students and 169 schools, and it makes your case. Unfortunately you have preemptively brought it into question. Might you have been mistaken to do so?
Excellent piece. I would share this on social media (and risk the ire of literally everyone) however I think what they will use to shoot it down is the delta variant being more transmissible and therefore the older studies don’t apply. Can you comment?
I had the same thought. The people I know would say that the delta variant is different since now kids are being affected. They wouldn’t care what data from July 2021 prior looks like. I do find it interesting though. My school district just voted to make masks mandatory for the next 30 days in a very contentious 5 hour school board meeting, even though less than 1 percent of students and teachers have tested positive with COVID.
I would also point to Philippe Lemoine's piece - what do things look like five, or twenty years from now (you know, that question public health never seems to ask itself anymore)? His answer was, COVID is always here but it's no longer serious. Why is it no longer serious? Because people are first infected when they are young and it is harmless, setting them on a path of lifelong immunity during which they are constantly reinfected, but it is never serious until they are old and weak. Eventually, he said, the only people who will be vaccinated are the elderly.
So if that is the eventual situation, and a central piece of that eventual situation is "kids get infected when young but that's fine because the disease is nearly harmless to them and that helps protect them for the rest of their lives"... then why are we fanatically attempting to prevent them from being infected now?
I would not be opposed to a mask mandate for unvaccinated kids in high school, but that's about it. My kids elementary school is making kids wear masks full time, including outside at recess. I'd pull them out except that my wife is a teacher at the school and that would be really awkward for everyone. It's ridiculous.
Masks in high school are a bit of a different beast since the risk calculation changes (older kids are higher risk than younger kids) and the nature of the negative effects of long-term masking changes as children get older.
Exactly. They're really two different issues. Unfortunately the debate is often just "schools" and districts are imposing the same restrictions across the board.
One thing I’m really curious about is the effect of masks on kids psychologically. Isn’t facial recognition super important for child development? I think you could potentially argue that masks are not neutral, they have a negative effect on kids. This was one of the few articles I could find… https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/well/family/how-children-learn-to-recognize-faces.html
I intentionally avoided the topic of the downsides of masks on kids specifically because that is a massive and contentious subject that I thought would distract from my main thesis.
This is a very loosely held position, but I think it's incredibly hard to know the long-term consequences for masking kids without simply doing it and finding out. That is an awfully risky game to play and I'm a little dispirited that so many people are happy to play it so casually.
I would love to see a clear eyed take on the downsides - I've come to believe there is significantly more risk to the downside than our national conversation allows.
As an aside - I find it distressing that our Public Health infrastructure has produced so little, and such poor, analysis surrounding the masking questions.
Thanks for another good post with actual data on this.
Anyone want to indulge in some baseless speculation on why it might be that masks do seem to have an impact for adults but not for kids? Some ideas:
- Kids don't keep them on as well as adults.
- If it's aerosol transmission, when you're sitting in a classroom all day with the same kids, whatever virions they're breathing out are going to diffuse around given enough time, regardless of the mask. Since teachers see each other for shorter periods during the day, masking may still help block some of their transmission between one another.
Other possibilities?
My speculation would be viral load. All of the following factors increase either the viral load or the duration of transmissibility:
- Size (adults are physically larger and so they will contain more viruses)
- Obesity (fat cells store more Sars-COV-2 than other tissues)
- Comorbidities, especially diabetes (increase uptake and take longer to clear)
- Age (older people take longer to clear out infections)
All those factors combined mean you simply can't compare a 300-pound, 50-year old, pre-diabetic vaccinated man to a 75-pound, 12-year old, healthy, unvaccinated old girl in terms of the risk of spread. They're not in the same ballpark.
But the bottom line is that they're already at extremely low risk anyway. Lowering your risk of dying from falling down the stairs is going to be very hard to measure and/or perceive because it's already so low.
I think you’ve misread the CDC study of mitigation policies in Georgia schools. Methodologically it is fine, IMO. The cited 37% reduction is due to mask mandates for unvaccinated faculty and staff, however. Buried in the report, and not mentioned in the summary, is the fact that mask mandates for students in these Georgia schools show zero effect on reducing incidents of COVID infection. It is the widest study available, covering over 90K students and 169 schools, and it makes your case. Unfortunately you have preemptively brought it into question. Might you have been mistaken to do so?
Excellent piece. I would share this on social media (and risk the ire of literally everyone) however I think what they will use to shoot it down is the delta variant being more transmissible and therefore the older studies don’t apply. Can you comment?
I had the same thought. The people I know would say that the delta variant is different since now kids are being affected. They wouldn’t care what data from July 2021 prior looks like. I do find it interesting though. My school district just voted to make masks mandatory for the next 30 days in a very contentious 5 hour school board meeting, even though less than 1 percent of students and teachers have tested positive with COVID.