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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

People aren’t scared up. Concern is around ICU usage and that elective surgery in hot areas are put on hold which include critical cancer removal surgeries.

Also we have a large group of unvaccinated group which are under kids under 12. With life going back to normal, the standard diseases are back like RSV, paraflu and others. Get two at the same time and it’s a emergency room visit. Get 3 at the same time and it’s life threatening. Two at the same time isn’t uncommon before covid. Now my pediatrician says 3 is happening and it’s a kid killer. It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.

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> It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.

It really shouldn’t if you’re an educated person who is following what scientific authorities are saying. The science here is still uncertain, but leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it. See: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski...

> At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notable, yet mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools… Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.

> In the realm of science and public-health policy outside the U.S., the implications of these particular findings are not exactly controversial. Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms.

Long-term we should just adopt the practice of wearing one if you're symptomatic. It helps reduce spread. This is what Asia started doing after SARS. It's considered a courtesy, just as we consider it a courtesy to cover your mouth when coughing or sneezing.

Japan kept doing it after Spanish Flu.

Unfortunately, given that 1910s America and 2020s America both had significant (and in my mind, unwarranted) resistance to wearing face masks; I would not be surprised if "wear a mask if you feel sick" fails to make it into common understanding in America a second time.

I'd be much much happier with "stay home if you feel sick" but I don't think we're getting there :(

This makes it sound like there was some groundbreaking CDC study that got hidden for political reasons.

It was a study of a single month in Georgia before Delta. Aside from the narrowness of the inputs I highly doubt school policy and ground truth were aligned.

That study is not enough to be driving policy.

The evidence for cotton and surgical mask--as used in actual practice--being effective at reducing the spread is pretty weak in general.

Most I've seen cited by mask proponents either don't use control groups (and thus can't really distinguish btwn other factors that correlate with mask wearing) or are laboratory tests just testing what % of particles are blocked by masks--which ignores almost every relevant question about mask mandates and relies on suspect theoretical models about how covid actually transmits between people.

I'm mystified why people on both sides are so up in arms about masks, but nobody gives one shit about uncontroversal and more effective mitigation techniques like air filtration and circulation.

An infected kid in classroom without proper air circulation could fill the classroom with enough virus to cause a super spreader event--mask or no-cotton/surgical mask.

> nobody gives one shit about uncontroversal and more effective mitigation techniques like air filtration and circulation.

How much would it cost to retrofit a bunch of schools with this stuff?

Ideally you'd do both. Have better air circulation, and institute masks when the regional caseload goes above a certain threshold.

I don't know, but it should pay dividends for generations given it'll probably slow down colds and flus too.

Even things like a box fan in a window are probably significantly more effective than scooby doo masks.

> box fan in a window

That's fine year-round in the south and southwest. Not so much in the rest of the country though.

Why should one preclude the other? Defense in depth and all that.

Billions in the US and it's part of the infrastructure bill and alot of investment right now. This is a multi-year effort (although IMHO functioning windows should be more normalized instead of going all in on HVAC).

I know that our teacher's union and the district we work for negotiated for almost a week about air filtration and circulation.

The HVAC is continuously circulating air from the time it is on until after school when it turns off. There is some time before school and maybe 20min after school when it is on.

They have settled on only pulling air from the outside instead of recycling the warm or cool air in the room.

And having some kind of agreement on the merv rating of the filters. It may be merv 7(but I'm not sure.)

The riled-up anti-mask parents get all the attention but in every district there are also parents pushing for more ventilation, testing, vaccinations, etc. In my school we've been able to get the ventilation upgraded with MERV-13 filters.

Some years back I had a professor who was doing research on the lack of air circulation leading to CO2 buildup in classrooms. CO2 has pretty deleterious effects of student achievement. Turns out oxygen is important for cognition, who knew? I can only assume it's worse with face masks.

What about all the surgeons that perform multi hour long surgeries then?

Surgical masks are designed to stop droplets, not aerosols so they're pretty loose. The mask is not form fitting around the nose. OR's also have dedicated filtration/HVAC systems with HEPA filters. I researched this when I was looking for a filter system for wildfire smoke.

The default policy should be a normal non-masked school year. People pushing masks need to produce a hell of a lot of evidence that masks work and are worth all the negative effects they might have on kids. In addition they need a clearly defined exit strategy. They should also articulate what problem masks on kids are trying to solve.

People claiming "all the negative effects they might have on kids" "need to produce a hell of a lot of evidence" of that.

That isn’t how this works. It isn’t my job to provide that evidence. Y’all want to force my 4 year old to wear a mask at her preschool. Prove it is necessary and won’t cause long term development issues.

It isn’t my job to prove it isn't necessary. I’m the one that needs to be convinced, not the other way around. Y’all are the ones trying to force this, not me.

How full is your local pediatric ICU? https://www.google.com/search?q=pediatric+icu+beds

If it's full then risking developmental issues for your child should probably be a less important to you than risking a highly contagious illness with the complications that entails (complications include death, permanent cognitive, neurological, respiratory and cardiovascular damage).

Ideally every responsible* parent could choose how they want to manage the risk for their child, but that's not always practical. With limited daycare and schooling facilities, there's a strong push to follow the more ~conservative~ (cautious) approaches. And this is at it should be. As they say "Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my face", so to should your freedom to choose the level of risk you are comfortable with be limited by the freedom for others to choose their level of risk.

*A responsible parent considers the welfare of the child first and foremost, not using children as tools to make points or demonstrate a commitment to a particular ideology or to otherwise serve their own interests.

Hospitals aren't full. ICU's will never fill up with kids having covid. It just won't happen.

Kids aren't at risk. We have more than a year and a half of data to support this.

> A responsible parent considers the welfare of the child first and foremost, not using children as tools to make points or demonstrate a commitment to a particular ideology or to otherwise serve their own interests.

Correct. And I'd argue almost everybody in favor of forcing kids to wear masks at school forgot this.

> Hospitals aren't full. ICU's will never fill up with kids having covid. It just won't happen.

It already has.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/13/us/dallas-county-no-pediatric...

> Kids aren't at risk.

Well, the Delta variant seems to be changing that.

Depriving kids of seeing facial expressions, depriving kids of seeing the smiles on the faces of their friends and teachers, for an entire year (or more?), during most of their socialization hours, is in and of itself a direct and terrible harm. It's one thing to require masks in the grocery store and at the doctor's office just to be on the safe side. Not much harm in that. But all-day, every day at school, a place which is the primary place to make friends, and not being able to see friend's smile? That is a horrible thing. If covid was actually so dangerous that we needed to worry about kids dying, then the proper response would be shutting down the schools entirely. If it is not dangerous, then we should allow kids to attend mask free and have an actually fully human experience.

If covid was so dangerous to children that they were dying all over the place, they’d have been first in line for vaccines way back in December.

Also it sickens me that people downvote your valid concerns. Kids need facial expressions. They need to hear and see each other to learn. I don’t know why that is so controversial.

That isn't how this works.

Yes, the emergency order for vaccines is generally for the higher risk population. But using a not very broadly tested vaccine that was given an emergency order first in kids doesn't seem like a good idea I guess.

Covid is extremely dangerous in kids. Long covid in kids isn't something I would ever want to expose my kids to if I had kids. If I had kids I would want them to wear a mask. I don't want to get covid from them if they happen to be a vector. I don't want them to develop a full-blown case. I don't want them to get it and then infect their mother or their friends or me or their teacher. I don't want anyone to get covid.

I've been reading all of your replies and you are an very emotional parent and I respect that and I understand that.

Kids might need facial expressions but kids 100% do need to be healthy and they aren't as resilient as you have said.

Okay, so your child gets covid isn't vaccinated and you end up finding out when they are in their mid-20s that they are developing some sort of a brain disorder that was brought on by long covid that we are completely unaware of because we don't know what's going to happen with this.

This is what's wrong with a lot of these short-sighted arguments is that... I might be afraid of covid and I might want zero covid but that is because I have the imagination to envision what could end up happening. and it's not far fetched it's not fear tactics it's not gaslighting.

While we know that kids need certain things for their developing brains, positive stimulus visual things and all of that... I don't know how you're not more afraid or more concerned about the unknowns about this virus.

Now I'm going to get a little opinionated here and it might be a little jab and I apologize for being rude... Are you sure that your actually not just worked up about this because you have a job you need your kids to go someplace during the day you're stressed about other parts of your life just crap like that?

Like for me personally, I'm disabled I stay at home all day I go out maybe once a week to get groceries and I double mask and I've been vaccinated since April 20th with Pfizer. Before this pandemic I didn't go anywhere.

I might be a little bit maladjusted but I'm not going to be rolling the dice on a virus that could potentially affect me my entire life when the life that I'm already living right now already has problems and I don't need people who are all "think of the children" acting short-sighted about all of this and putting people like me at risk putting people at risk putting themselves at risk.

I wish people would take this more seriously. Yeah we could have an entire year or two of no social encounters or deprived extroverts but think long-term on how we could have a whole slice of humanity that's getting this virus that is basically just messing up how their DNA is going to unfold how all of their proteins are going to unfold basically turning into a whole new research sector.

We have all of the knowledge and the ways to avoid all of this but we have people that just give up and accept that oh we're all going to get it so just buck up old chap.

Covid is extremely dangerous in kids.

No it's not. Death rates are less than 1 in 50,000. Death and hospitalization rates are similar to the dangers of the flu or RSV or riding in a car. It's a 100X less dangerous than owning a pool. It's the type of risk we have to be able to live with. And as for long covid, I don't have the study on hand, but there was a study where there was no difference months later in symptoms like fatigue or runny nose in kids that had covid versus did not have covid.

Or maybe they get vaccinated but the vaccine causes some prion disease that does not show up for 10 years. Or maybe a new mutant strain causes ADE in the vaccinated. Life is full of dangerous, speculative unknowns unknowns. But worrying about this kind of speculative, zero-evidence risks is the route to hypochondria.

I don't want anyone to get covid....Yeah we could have an entire year or two of no social encounters or deprived extroverts but think long-term on how we could have a whole slice of humanity that's getting this virus that is basically just messing up how their DNA is going to unfold how all of their proteins are going to unfold basically turning into a whole new research sector.

Based on current U.S. government policy, why is it going to just be a year or two? It's already been a year and a half. What is going to change to make covid magically go away? It's not going away, covid is endemic. You either will have to isolate and wear P100 masks for the rest of your life, or you will get exposed to covid eventually.

CO2 is pretty horrible for cognition. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2016/07/indoor-co2-dumb-a...

“masks need to produce a hell of a lot of evidence” vs “all the negative effects they might have on kids”

Those are some wildly different standards. You can convince yourself of anything if you assume it’s correct and raise the bar high enough for counter evidence.

Please list the negative effects. Should be easy since there are so many.

Not being able to see the facial expressions and smiles of their friends and teachers.

Ok, anything actually harmful?

Notable is that the article is referring to a pre-delta study of elementary aged school children (elementary school normally caps out at around age 11 in the US). Young kids have long been known to be less prone to infection, less prone to suffering ill effects from infection, and less prone to spread the disease. Delta doesn't really change much of that, they are not the primary victims nor spreaders.

It's the older kids (who could have received the vaccine but opted out) who will have more "adult-like" patterns of transmission and should be more of a concern (not for their own health, really, but they might infect their elderly or infirmed unvaccinated relatives). One would expect masking to help prevent spread from these people.

But of course... these kids and their families likely already self-select and associate closesly with other anti-vaxers outside of school to begin with, so school seems like the least of their worries. At a certain point you kind of have to ask whether it's worth trying to protect people from themselves.

> Delta doesn't really change much of that, they are not the primary victims nor spreaders. And yet, in some parts of the US, government guidance requires masks from age 2.

My own suspicion is that it does probably help on the margins with young kids and delta, but we obviously don't have data on it yet. On paper, erring on the side of caution is desirable even if it proves needless eventually, since there's no direct health downside.

Unfortunately, since this is also a political issue, erring on the side of caution with mask requirements and being wrong generates more mistrust amongst the older people who have opted out of the vaccine (i.e. those already distrustful of the CDC and at risk of serious illness just have one more reason to dig in and ignore the advice to get vaccinated).

It's possible that such mask mandates for young children may prove harmful because they further entrench anti-vax sentiment (even if is ultimately proven that they have marginal benefits in reducing spread).

This is a fascinating and complicated issue indeed...

> On paper, erring on the side of caution is desirable even if it proves needless eventually, since there's no direct health downside.

Being treated like a toxic disease vector for two years surely has direct health downsides. Not learning to read faces surely has direct health downsides. Breathing god knows what those masks are made of every day surely has health downsides.

And it isn’t even my job to prove any of that. People that want to force kids to wear masks at school need to prove those aren’t something to worry about. They can’t just shrug they crap off and say “yeah well covid”. We are well beyond being able to simply use covid as an excuse to enact some restriction. Prove kids need masks and prove they won’t suffer long or even short term effects from wearing masks all day. Then and only then can you even dream of forcing kids to wear masks.

My understanding is that Delta is being spread more easily by children of school age

Delta actually changes that.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

Right, but the CDC guidance recommends masking elementary-age children (2+). We’d be having a different conversation if the CDC guidance was 12+ like several European countries.

Delta wasn’t dominant by May. Does this still hold?

So the CDC are not educated nor intelligent, I guess?

"Due to the circulating and highly contagious Delta variant, CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status."

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-...

Also, the very study NYMag talks about still recommends: "Because universal and correct use of masks can reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission (6) and is a relatively low-cost and easily implemented strategy, findings in this report suggest universal and correct mask use is an important COVID-19 prevention strategy in schools as part of a multicomponent approach."

I'd love to see a teacher try and mandate correct use of masks on a bunch of 2 year olds :D

CDC doesn't make public policy. Nowhere did you mention what the harms of this forced mask use could be on kids. Even if masks offered some protection it has to be balanced against all manner of long term social, language and developmental effects caused from wearing a mask.

The CDC's public guidance during this pandemic is going to end up in communications classes alongside New Coke and the Osborne 1. They're so lucky they were bailed out (mostly) by vaccines. They opened by saying masks didn't work (a straight up lie, even if a well-intentioned one) and stuck to that line for at least a month. Then they did a 180, deleted their tweets, and spent the rest of 2020 saying masks were necessary. Then it was no masks for the vaccinated. Now it's masks for everyone again. Along the way they've somehow managed to lag and jump ahead of the actual research on masks and public trust in the CDC, their greatest asset, is now around 52% - poetically the same as the US vaccination rate.

Yes, scientific uncertainty is a thing. It would be great if we instantly had tons of studies and replications showing exactly how effective different measures are, but that is just not how it works. I can cite many models that show masking works, if you're curious.

This same line of argument was used to question climate change for decades and to support the argument that we should not take any aggressive measures to avoid it.

There's a good chance wearing masks in schools makes the community safer from serious illness. And the risk in wearing masks if they prove to be useless is...what exactly? That masks are a little uncomfortable?

Serious illness, bad as it is, is a lot more predictable than fear/security driven social engineering, and when cover-your-smile is rolled into cover your cough, I'd expect unintended consequences, socially, developmentally. You must realize there are other problems than COVID, and some are much more important. Your Pascal's Wager about masks is a bit revealing vis-a-vis any certainty about the evidence.

I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek's story about Niels Bohr having a horseshoe above his door:[0]

"surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr's country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: "I don't believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn't believe in it at all." This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them."[1]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859145

[1] - http://brooklynbooktalk.blogspot.com/2010/02/its-ideology-st...

Unlike horseshoes, there is credible research and wide consensus among experts that masks work

Zizek wagers that a new form of communism decidedly distinct from pre-COVID way of doing things can emerge from the socio-political experience of COVID, he may not be on your side here.

Probably helpful bias calibration for those unfamiliar with Zizek. Interesting that perceived sides and the not content of the message should carry such weight. A person with differing views and conclusions on some issue can still convey information, and I do not immediately see much relationship between uncertainty in the Bohr apocrypha and ulterior motives(? beliefs?) of the philosopher who relayed it.

> Interesting that perceived sides and the not content of the message should carry such weight. A person with differing views and conclusions on some issue can still convey information, and I do not immediately see much relationship between uncertainty in the Bohr apocrypha and ulterior motives(? beliefs?) of the philosopher who relayed it.

Except we're talking about Zizek! This is not Michel Foucault ("Everything I say is just a toolbox, you can use what you like, discard what you don't"). He does not share your rather postmodern outlook on discourse and language, if he did, if his work was meant to accede to any notion of "Oh, words and statements are free-floating, unbound to their context, meaning is indeterminate, there are only different perspectives", etc, his whole platform would fall apart; he intends the opposite of what you're talking about with his speech. He literally defines the work that he does as partisan without ambiguity. There are pages spent in his books and multiple reminders given at his in-person lectures on this point that anything such is an objection to his platform.

It's either fidelity to his meaning, which, to be clear, is not some smarmy, one-off that misapplies his example to make a silly point about not continuing to wear masks (which, by the way, is a perfectly quantifiable question rather than a 'merely ideological' one), or the information conveyed means nothing at all. You either get that he deploys examples like these, and he has a billion over the course of work (it just so happened this one had language useful to grandparent's intended meaning), to illustrate his interpretation of commodity fetishism, the basis for his critique of ideology, or you've rendered all of his meaning bankrupt. So, yes, in his case, its either/or, and that's by design!

Thank you! I do prefer to defer to a framework of Bohr's than to Zizek's.

It’s not just uncertainty as to whether masks work on kids, but uncertainty as to the impact of masking on the development of younger children.

As to your climate change example—here, the US is again the odd one out. Other developed countries are not masking toddlers, like the CDC recommends.

You are responding to a conservative commentator who is trying to muddle and make non-scientific conservative positions more palatable and less non-sensical.

I have noticed that wealthy, educated, conservatives (for tax benefits) work hard to justify and provide some vaguely scientific and logical grounding to all kinds of weird conservative talking points. This might be by punching hard at some corner of the liberal/scientific consensus on an issue that is not quite well developed or the audience lacks full detail on. This equalizes both liberal and conservative positions as some what unscientific, while the reality is quite opposite. You will never find rayiner attack conservative talking points, only liberal ones.

You think you are in a scientific discussion, but you are actually participating in a political one.

Well I can’t speak for other countries, but in France mask is mandatory in schools from age 6. It’s been like this for a year and will most likely continue in september for the new school year.

Critically, this is all pre-Delta. It seems common sense to me that kids should wear masks at school, and I don't think we have science that can dispute that common sense at this point.

Of course, the problem is, and always has been with COVID, that my common sense is different from yours and vice versa...

How is "the science here is still uncertain" an argument against masks in schools?

If it turns out they are useful, wearing them will have been a good idea.

If it turns out that they weren't useful, what harm has been caused?

(I'm aware that there are people out there who think wearing masks for a year or two will scar children for life, but for the most part I don't think those people are arguing in good faith. The biggest harm I see is to children with hearing problems who are prevented from lip reading.)

Muh freedoms is why there are still people fighting masks.

Good question. Who are they now protecting? People who refuse to get a vaccine?

Exactly this. This is why the vaccines have been rolled out. If somebody doesn't want to wear a mask now they shouldn't have to if the vaccine has been offered to everyone in their country.

I have a neighbor that has only one lung due to a genetic defect. She is at much greater risk of dying even after vaccination. Your fee-fees are not more important than her life.

With one lung she's at a much greater risk of dying of anything... Let's not pretend that she was never at risk of dying before covid-19...

One possible harm I've seen postulated is moral licensing, i.e. wearing a mask makes people feel safer and thus makes them more willing to be indoors in close proximity for longer.

A counter-argument says that wearing a physical thing can act as a constant reminder of covid, causing people to act more responsibly.

Back on the harms side again, there's a possibility that teaching kids "just do this and don't ask questions" can have negative consequences. Again, the counter argument of letting them ask questions and carefully explaining what we do and don't know can be a positive.

I wonder if there has been research that attempts to answer the question of whether masks encourage less safe or more safe behaviour - it feels to me like something that would respond well to a well designed study.

Anecdotally speaking, in my corner of England social distancing went out of the window shortly after masks were mandated in shops.

In addition, several of the "masks don't work" studies I saw had to do with people touching or messing with their masks undoing any benefits of actually wearing a mask.

>Back on the harms side again, there's a possibility that teaching kids "just do this and don't ask questions" can have negative consequences.

Don't worry. The schools teach that with or without masks.

If it turns out that they weren't useful, what harm has been caused?

Socializing in masks is massively inferior. It sucks talking to other people and not being able to read facial expressions or to see smiles. Right now American health officials are asking children to an spend the majority of their waking hours for an entire year of their lives (or more??) around friends and teachers without that essential human experience of seeing smiles. That is harm in an of itself. Even if the kids bounce back, and you can't find a developmental difference in any statistic, that year of their life, a year they will never get back, will still have been a year of being deprived of essential human connection.

Because I don't want to is a perfectly acceptable reason to say no. "Muh Freedoms" is all the argument you need.

I've worn a mask for probably over 1500 hours in a restaurant that never closed and I and my coworkers have gotten along just fine. I just don't understand why so many people are resisting them so and acting so put upon.

Do you plan on wearing a mask for the next year while socializing with your friends? If yes, do you see this as a big burden or a small burden?

> If it turns out that they weren't useful, what harm has been caused?

If masks are ineffective, wearing them amounts to theatrics/fiction.

If that fiction creates a false sense of safety, it can encourage people to take risks like interacting in closer proximity than they would otherwise.

I have no knowledge or expertise on if masks are effective nor have any children, this is just an observation of what seems like an obvious potential harm.

It seems obvious that wearing masks all day would hinder social and verbal development in toddlers and small children, at least to some extent. I think everyone can agree that they wouldn't help in these areas?

You might think the public health benefits outweigh this concern, but it's disingenuous imo to just assert that there are no conceivable negative effects for a two year old having their first social experiences.

This is a good answer. I've not been thinking in terms of two year olds - I've been assuming this debate is mostly about children who are elementary school and above.

Not to mention the effects on children who struggle with their hearing and need to lip-read, from a disability rights point of view I don't think it's quite as simple as "masking kids is great, end of story".

A year of a kids life is an eternity for them. Two is forever! You are stealing their childhood away from them to protect who, exactly? What is even the point of masking them.

Teachers have been vaccinated. Parents have been vaccinated. Kids aren’t at risk. Why this obsession with reducing cases if we took the sting out of covid?

Kids need to be children. They aren’t human shields for adults. Adults are expect to sacrifice for kids, not the other way around. Kids deserve their one and only childhood. They don’t deserve to be treated like disease vectors that need to be muzzled to make frightened parents and educators feel safe. Double so when all those adults can get a free, highly effective vaccine.

Making them mandatory is even worse. The state has no right to force my kid to wear a mask at school in order to have an education. Parents should be making that call for their own kid.

"Teachers have been vaccinated. Parents have been vaccinated."

I really wish that was true! Sadly in the USA the amount of "vaccine hesitancy" remains unbelievably high.

Who cares? If you and your loved ones are vaccinated y’all are good to go.

As the article this discussion is about… covid is here forever. Time to accept it and move the hell on.

I care.

I'm vaccinated. I can still catch it - I'm much more unlikely to end up in hospital, but it's still an unpleasant illness to have, with a small chance of long-term complications that are not at all well understood.

And if I do catch it I can still spread it to others, who may not be vaccinated.

I very much care about not killing someone else by spreading Covid to them, even if they deliberately chose not to get the vaccine. I'm furious with them (and with the information sources they consumed that lead them to that decision) but I absolutely don't want to contribute to their suffering or death.

>I can still catch it

Yes, you can still catch it regardless what we do with NPIs. Stop living in fear.

Judging by how many of my well thought out comments got downvoted… lots of people here are living in fear still.

It’s son intellectually dishonest to downvote people who express valid criticism. It’s pure tribalism… which is what is just about 40% for all our actions the last 1.6 years.

I hate to be blunt but sometimes life is unpleasant, even more so now. Do you think that it's fair to demand people change their way of living because you don't want an unpleasant illness? I think it's unpleasant when people eat seafood (I don't like the smell) but I don't demand everybody stop eating seafood.

"Do you think that it's fair to demand people change their way of living because you don't want an unpleasant illness?"

I think it's fair to demand that they change their way of living to prevent more deaths - 645,000 and counting just in the USA.

If we weren't living in a sea of unvaccinated people this conversation would be a lot easier.

Manners change over time. Maybe masks will join normal etiquette with other polite things, which benefits everyone around. (such as: closing your mouth when coughing, washing hands after going to the toilet, wearing at least shorts)

You do you. Just don't force society to continue doing any of this, that's all I ask. It's time to move on.

Let me try and follow your logic here.

You say the vaccine doesn't stop you from catching or spreading the virus, it just stops you from getting as badly sick. If that's the case then why do you care whether others are vaccinated or not? If it doesn't change the chances of them passing it on to you, and just changes how sick they'll get, then surely it doesn't make any difference to you?

> If it doesn't change the chances of them passing it on to you

Where are they saying that?

I advise you don't go into forests to enjoy nature, there is a small chance you'll get bitten by a tick and contract chronic lyme disease which happened to my brother in law. It could happen to you too, there's a chance. Better not risk it.

It's obviously perfectly fine for you to feel that way about Covid, but in my opinion the correct thing for you to do would be to isolate yourself and try to minimize the chance of being infected instead of wanting further damaging restrictions to be forced on other people (I don't mean relatively non-intrusive measures such as mask wearing, but any form of lockdowns).

Even masks. Because covid is here forever and people need to accept that and live with it.

I think the most economical way of thinking about it is that we're stuck with a percentage of refuseniks and have to deal with them continuing to spread covid.

I am of a certain population that is more succeptable, and I just accept that there are people who would welcome my death from covid if it would save them from the slightest inconvenience.

I admire you for making reasonable arguments, you have more patience than me by far.

> Who cares? If you and your loved ones are vaccinated y’all are good to go.

The effects of COVID complications aren't somehow magically isolated to the patient. Good luck to anyone who's young, healthy, and COVID-vaccinated, but has a bike or car accident, gives birth in a hospital, falls down some stairs, or otherwise requires inpatient care.

Remember the endlessly repeated mantra to "flatten the curve" from circa March 2020? The "curve" refers to ICU occupancy. Max that out and suddenly the effects of COVID spill beyond just sickening and killing its direct victims to complicating your health system.

I thought we already flattened the curve. In March 2020. So why aren't we back to normal now?

Because the privileged tech worker class is still afraid even after everybody they know got vaccinated.

Delta infects and kills kids. PICUs are getting full in some areas.

No. Don't remember? Someone, somewhere, early in the beginning said children are not affected at all!!1! /s

It's a surgical mask, not a ball and chain.

You are forcing children, who are entirely dependent upon the judgment of adults, to wear a mask every day of school--indefinitely. That is a pretty big ask. Especially with almost no proof that it is required, works, and doesn't harm children.

What's the difference between that and asking them to wear a uniform?

Unlike a uniform masks cover the most important way humans express emotion. That alone is enough reason to not require kids to wear them.

The justification for kids wearing masks is so paper thin with so little attention paid to what emotional and development effects it has on the kids… it boggles my mind. Supporting kids in masks is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

And to the people downvoting me and gaslighting me… you are part of the problem. I have a right to feel the way I do, which is reason enough to never, ever force parents to mask their kids in order to get public education. It should be the parents choice, period.

The fact that we've let one disgusting abuse to creep up on us is not an excuse to green light all of them. Uniform may not be the hill to die on, but a pretty awful thing nonetheless. In ex-USSR during early 90s, when many rules around school discipline were effectively spayed, what went out - let me tell you - red ties first, and uniforms the close second. Despite all the scolding from principals and teachers.

Exactly right. The parent poster you replied to is another in the long list of people that flippantly disregard the harms of masking. Good luck dealing with a generation that has developed unhealthy phobias and has severe emotional attachment issues that's also unequipped to enter college.

I never considered this argument. Glad this comment thread hasn't descended into silly name calling and people are actually putting their arguments forwards

As a former kid (lol), I can't say having to wear a mask would have had any adverse effect on my school experience. It sucked anyways. I hated being there and hated wasting my life every day being shown material that was of zero benefit to me, and being treated like crap by people who don't even know me.

Honestly back then I would have felt the same thing that I do now: that I am happy to wear a mask so I and/or my parents/grandparents or other people around me don't die of a completely preventable virus, and that people who refuse to wear masks are idiots for not doing the most simple, effortless thing to help prevent the needless spread of the virus.

Wearing a mask doesn't steal anyone's childhood. Does wearing glasses steal your childhood? How about braces? We do A LOT of uncomfortable things in our life for our health and future. Wearing a mask is one of those things, due to the ongoing pandemic.

I mean, added bonus, I haven't had a single cold or flu or anything like that in over a year and a half. I'm guessing you (and anyone reading this) can probably say the same, if you strictly masked up, used hand sanitizer, etc. Yeah I've been sick for other reasons, but not a single time have I been sick from something transmitted by another person. First time in my decades of life that I've gone this long without any transmissible illness.

Honestly, all of your stuff sounds like rationalization. Rationalizing putting masks on kids despite there being little evidence they work, are something society wants, and won't have any negative impact on kids. Don't forget, kids have agency. Has anybody asked them what they want?

And it isn't my job to provide proof or data. I'm the critic. I'm the one that wants things to operate as normal. All the burden of proof is upon those who wish to force my child to wear a mask her entire school day 5 days a week. Thus far, all I hear is "OMG CASES", "kids are resilient", and a bunch of weak rationalizations. Nobody has made a case who or what we are protecting. Nobody has provided an end game. Nobody has proven it won't harm kids. Nobody has even asked kids. It's disgusting, really.

Aren't we protecting our health systems? Mississippi is out of ICU beds[0]. As in, if you are in critical condition for ANY REASON, you're just out of luck. Kids are gross. They're going to spread disease. Why not take a (relatively simple) precaution that can save lives, including people who didn't even catch COVID.

It's like how I look both ways before turning onto or crossing a one-way. Sure, it probably doesn't help much, but there's a chance that it could save my life and another driver's.

[0]: https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/14,21994,420,873.html

From everything I've read Mississippi is out of ICU beds because they test everybody for covid and if you are covid positive, regardless of symptoms, you get the "covid protocol" treatment. Said protocol adds significant overhead to everything. Perhaps they should revisit testing every individual for covid or maybe stop freaking out over every positive case.

Also, they had 1.6 years to build infrastructure to deal with this. That was the entire damn point of this in the first place. "Flatten the curve for two weeks to make sure healthcare systems can handle the load" There is literally zero excuse for society to suffer because no capacity was added. Zero.

You cannot even blame staffing shortages... they could have thrown truckloads of money at doctors and nurses to get them onboard. It would have still been cheaper and more effective than the nonsense we are doing now.

In short, yeah it sucks hospitals might be "full" but that ain't societies fault and we shouldn't be punished for it.

Judging by your stance across this thread I doubt it will matter, but I'll share it anyway for the readers. Take it for whatever you think it's worth.

My anecdotal experience via my SO who is an ICU nurse is that what you've read is not accurate. In the ICU I'm familiar with they do not have fewer beds available due to the covid protocols. The protocols do make their job more difficult and time consuming, but they have more beds than ever. Still, they're at capacity across our state due to an extreme influx of severe covid cases since delta made its way here over the past 6 weeks. Previous to that this particular ICU was ~20% covid, 60% capacity. Now it is ~90% covid, 110% capacity. This is not just because they tested positive - these are people on various levels of oxygen. They are intubating covid patients in the ER because there's no room anywhere else.

I'm in arguably the reddest state in the US where most people share your views. I'm not sure how you can say apathy toward spreading a contagious virus is not societies "fault".

PS: they are throwing truckloads of money at doctors and nurses, luckily for us.

> I'm not sure how you can say apathy toward spreading a contagious virus is not societies "fault".

Moralizing spreading an airborne highly contagious respiratory virus is one of the most toxic, dangerous things we’ve done. It’s absurd. It’s a virus. It does what it does. People catch it. It’s nobody’s fault.

The people living in your red state are perfectly fine holding their beliefs.

Opposing governmental mandates is one thing, but eschewing personal responsibility is supposed to be the antithesis of these folks worldview. It's a bit baffling, though sadly not surprising.

And to be clear, the majority of the conservatives I know personally are vaccinated and wear masks, by virtue of their belief in personal responsibility.

"You are stealing their childhood away"

Stealing their childhood away, really? It's an article of clothing. My kid objects to wearing pants a whole lot more than he objects to wearing a mask. He still needs to wear pants.

Come to think of it, maybe that's why this is such a huge deal. People have come to think of clothing as a marker of your tribe, and not wearing the expected clothing as social deviancy. That's why wearing a hajib is so triggering for so many Americans, or why guys wearing skirts is an affront against nature (but strangely not in Scotland!), or why folks get killed over wearing gang colors, or why I desperately wanted a denim jacket when I was in 1st grade in the 80s.

And if that's the case, sure, you can have your tribe and I'll have mine, and my kid will wear a mask because that's what the people around him do, and yours won't because that's what the people around her do, and then maybe my tribe will still have ICU units available and yours won't. Okay. But I can assure you that kids in Singapore or Taiwan or now California, where mask-wearing is just accepted, grow up just fine.

Great just don’t force my kid to wear a mask at school. That’s all I ask.

I find forcing kids to wear masks at school so morally bankrupt I am at a loss for words. And all I get from the people who push it is rationalization and gaslighting.

I have a right to object to my daughter wearing a mask at school. You have no right to force that on me and my family.

I'm okay with that. Think it's dumb but it's your school, not mine. My 3-year-old's preschool requires masks and it's fine. Was a bit of an adjustment (they were not required to wear one last year, as 2's) but over the first 2 weeks of school you can see the whole class going from 1 little girl who wore one last year (even though not required) to about half the class wearing them at the start of this year, to everyone just doing it automatically. My kid will even ask for his mask if we're going out to the playground now.

and if my kid asked to wear a mask I’d tell them it is unnecessary, they aren’t gonna die of covid and just because everybody else does it doesn’t make it right. Peer pressure isn’t always good.

Kids don’t need masks. End of story.

Oh, come on. I couldn't wear shorts to school in elementary school. Principle's rules, and it didn't matter how hot it was.

Nor could I wear things that showed shoulders, among a slew of other things. I wasn't allowed to take a same-sex love interest to proms, nor anyone from another school (and it didn't matter that they lived in the same neighborhood). Blue hair? Go home until you fix it. We were told that the homecoming "powder puff" game was their legal girls football.

Heck, we had people watch us enter toilet stalls in elementary school to 'make sure' we peed during break.

These things happen all the time for both children and adults. Some were just stupid rules and some really freaking unfair, but most didn't ruin childhoods. And yet, folks are asking to wear masks to protect others because we think it helps is somehow ruining childhoods?

I gotta say, I just don't understand.

Pretty much all I hear from the pro-mask at school club are rationalizations. Your rebuttal is nothing but gaslighting me and rationalization. No facts, no science, no data.

It’s honestly abusive. How dare the government force my child to wear a mask at school against my objections.

So, instead of explaining literally anything, you come back saying you are victim (without explaining how), upholding your right to possibly put your child in danger (because I doubt you are a disease expert), and everyone is lying without facts - facts that you yourself didn't offer?

Don't kids in Singapore and Taiwan only wear masks when they're sick? (Rather than the entire class at all times; at least, up until the start of the pandemic.) If so, it seems like a mistake to use that as any precedent for how kids in California will grow up under the present regime.

Stealing their childhood away, really? It's an article of clothing.

It's an article of clothing which covers of the faces, the facial expressions, the smiles of all their friends and teachers. A typical modern preschool for two working parents is what, 50 hours a week? You are sending your child to a place where they are spending the bulk of their waking hours, the bulk of their socialization, and not allowing them to see smiles. I can still remember the faces of my preschool friends, I am still friends with some. If I had never been able to match smiles with them, would it still be the same? And even if they are fine in the long run, you are still making a year of their life (or more? what is the end game exactly?) significantly worse. It boggles my mind that smart people like yourself are so blase about this.

and then maybe my tribe will still have ICU units available and yours won't.

Masking kids at schools isn't going to have anything to do with this. Denmark has done just fine keeping schools open with no masking ( https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/denmark-schools-covid-19-pande... ). If ICU's are within two or three doublings of filling up, then shut down the gyms and concerts and indoor dining for adults. If all such things are open, as I believe they are in California, then protecting ICU units is clearly not an imminent concern.

Okay. But I can assure you that kids in Singapore or Taiwan or now California, where mask-wearing is just accepted, grow up just fine.

What? Until coronavirus hit, there has never been a society that kept it's children masked among children from other families at all times. No kid has "grown up" under such conditions.

You’re absolutely wrong about the last point. The people raising risks to childhood development from masking are serious people making serious arguments: https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/mandatory-masking-of-sc...

This is as an article by medical professors at USC and Stanford:

> At the same time, the long-term harm to kids from masking is potentially enormous. Masking is a psychological stressor for children and disrupts learning. Covering the lower half of the face of both teacher and pupil reduces the ability to communicate. In particular, children lose the experience of mimicking expressions, an essential tool of nonverbal communication. Positive emotions such as laughing and smiling become less recognizable, and negative emotions get amplified. Bonding between teachers and students takes a hit. Overall, it is likely that masking exacerbates the chances that a child will experience anxiety and depression, which are already at pandemic levels themselves.

I don’t know if you have young children, but facial expressions are a huge part of communication. My kids are constantly looking at my face to for “is this okay” signals. Kids learn to look at facial expressions of peers to understand what they’re thinking and feeling. There’s just tons and tons of research on this.

Masks for kids isn’t like masks for adults, where you can say “well even if they don’t work there’s no harm.” What we don’t have is research showing that wearing masks has persistent negative effects on kids, but based on what we do know that’s a real possible harm that has to be weighed against the possible benefits of masking.

> My kids are constantly looking at my face to for “is this okay” signals

Nobody's expecting you to wear masks at home.

Whats your point, that doesn't invalidate the argument at all.

Your argument is that kids *might* have trouble developing social cues because facial expressions are hidden behind masks.

But, even with masks on at school, your kids have plenty of unmasked time at home.

This is one reason why, after 18 months of masking, there is still no data supporting your argument.

Where is your data that they don’t have long term developmental effects from wearing masks and missing facial cues? Eh?

It isn’t my job to prove anything. Y’all want to force my daughter to wear a mask to attend a public school you better have a hell of a lot of evidence and data to back it up. You need to address each and every criticism and support it with solid research conducted over years of time.

None of that exists and all criticism no matter how valid is met with gaslighting, being called a right wing fool, and name calling. Which says to me there is no solid justification for kids wearing masks besides partisan politics and tribalism.

Y’all are signing my kid up to be your unconsenting laboratory experiment, which is highly unethical and straight up immoral.

I’m not the one pushing kids to forcefully wear masks. You are. It’s disgusting and one of the worst things we’ve done. Almost no European country masks their kids. A handful of blue states are basically alone in forcing kids to wear masks at school. Which really underscores what is really going on, and it ain’t “science”.

>Where is your data that they don’t have long term developmental effects from wearing masks and missing facial cues? Eh?

Asking someone to prove a negative when they indicate there is no positive evidence pointing towards the assertion you're making isn't a 'checkmate' retort.

Negatives are much harder to prove than positives. You aren't being gaslit.

Maybe take a step back and calm down. Saying things like:

>I’m not the one pushing kids to forcefully wear masks. You are. It’s disgusting and one of the worst things we’ve done.

Is probably too emotionally charged to result in a good dialog, if that's what you're looking for.

Damn right I’m emotional. Y’all are gaslighting me and trying to bully my daughter into wearing a mask at school. I love my daughters smile. She should show it and not hide it behind a mask. You better have proof it doesn’t fuck her up. It’s so morally disgusting I’d rather not say exactly what I think of people who gleefully want to force kids to wear a mask and write it off as “no big deal” or “my kid doesn’t have a problem”. Suffice so say let’s go with “monster”.

The entire burden of proof is on you people trying to make this massive deviation from normal. Not me. You have to support your arguments with more than telling me I’m emotional or blowing it out of proportion. Because I have a right to be massively emotional and pissed off. I am fully within my rights to defend my daughter from what I perceive as a great harm. And y’all have no right to tell me how to feel.

Seriously. It’s abuse. You mask people are super abusive. Giant bullies using your loud voices, mockery and name calling to drown out anybody with valid criticisms.

So to the “force kids to wear masks” people here, put up or shut up. Show me proof it won’t fuck my daughter up and show me proof it is actually going to benefit her. And if you can’t provide that proof than go bugger off, I’ll yell at you, the administration and my dumbass governor and his unelected health “experts”. My daughter is more important than any of y’all’s unfounded mandates.

Because near as I can tell there is absolutely no benefit for the actual child wearing a mask. It’s all for giving the appearance of protecting adults, who have a choice to be fully vaccinated. Which is so immoral and so wrong, again, I’ll refrain from stating exactly what I think of the people pushing for it.

>Damn right I’m emotional. Y’all are gaslighting me and trying to bully my daughter into wearing a mask at school.

No one is gaslighting you, nor is asking you to discuss things in a civil manner 'abuse'.

If you assume everyone discussing this with you are doing so in bad faith despite their best efforts to be reasonable, you don't really keep the door open for any new perspectives.

Yes because your way is the correct way, right? Anybody who disagrees is a dirty, alt-right mis-informed trump fucker. Right? Might as well just say it.

We made dramatic, massive social changes virtually overnight and continued them for more than 1.6 years. Why is it so hard to imagine that smart, well intentioned people might have a difference of opinion from the narrative we’ve all had shoved down our throats? Eh?

Just magically every single person who is smart and well meaning obviously has to support masks, lockdowns, school closures, and everything else. Otherwise they are a dumb stupid misinformed “them”.

It’s absolutely absurd thinking. The arguments made to force this nonsense on people represent some of the worst attributes of humanity. Gaslighting. Abusive. Bullying. Shaming. Narcissistic. Unscientific and completely intellectually dishonest.

Seriously. Knock it off. Y’all should be ashamed of yourself.

>Anybody who disagrees is a dirty, alt-right mis-informed trump fucker. Right?

Not at all, but that doesn't mean everyone who disagrees is discussing the matter in a civil manner.

I've only posted to bring attention to a flaw in your logic, as well as to comment on the emotionally hostile manner in which you've been replying.

Just take a step back and calm down; people don't seem to agree with your positions and you're taking it as a personal attack. Engage with people in good faith and discussions will be more fruitful and less emotionally taxing.

The article discusses a few of the potential harms to young children. At that age, children are learning how to read social cues, and they do that by observing faces. An indefinite mask mandate that lasts for years could have developmental consequences for these children.

For the same reasons, I think that lucky rabbit’s feet should be mandatory. Also, horoscopes should be consulted prior to attending schools. If you can think of anything else that didn’t work for this or any other illnesses in history, then I think that you should demand schools make them mandatory, just in case.

Have you looked at the actual report and not the anti-vax site summation of the report?

>. The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.

I'm not sure how 21% lower is considered "not statistically significant", in trying to suppress the spread, ANYTHING > 0% is helpful. Full stop.

Other stand out qualifiers from same report

>This finding might be attributed to higher effectiveness of masks among adults, who are at higher risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection but might also result from differences in mask-wearing behavior among students in schools with optional requirements. Mask use requirements were limited in this sample;

>The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations.

> * First, many COVID-19 cases were self-reported by staff members and parents or guardians, and prevention strategies reported by administrators or nurses might not reflect day-to-day activities or represent all school classrooms, and *did not include an assessment of compliance* (e.g., mask use).

>* Second, the study had limited power to detect lower incidence for potentially effective, but less frequently implemented strategies, such as air filtration and purification systems; only 16 schools reported implementing this ventilation improvement.

> * Third, the response rate was low (11.6%), and some participating schools had missing information about ventilation improvements. However, incidence per 500 students was similar between participating (3.08 cases) and nonparticipating (2.90 cases) schools, suggesting any systematic bias might be low.

>* Finally, the data from this cross-sectional study cannot be used to infer causal relationships.

Basically was relying on self reporting. If a student contracted and was asymptomatic, not shown here, etc.

> I'm not sure how 21% lower is considered "not statistically significant", in trying to suppress the spread, ANYTHING > 0% is helpful. Full stop.

Statistical significance has a specific meaning in the context of hypothesis testing. It is a measure of likelihood that the observed result occurred due to a real difference between groups (rather than random chance).

It seems that they are adding up the margin of errors for 82/1461 and 87/1461, (schools responded divided by schools surveyed), giving a total margin of error of ~20% for these optional vs. mandatory masked student statistics. This is a problem with using surveys with a low response rate.

In their own words in that section, by the incident rate ratio it is statistically significant, even after having been adjusted for county level 7 day incidence.

You can try and figure it out on page 4 of the cdc report, it does not appear to be a null hypothesis test.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7021e1-H.pdf

Self-report is a notoriously bad way to "study" almost anything.

> did not include an assessment of compliance (e.g., mask use).

This is not a rebuttal.

If you establish a policy, and people do not follow the policy, that's on you, not on the people. You don't get to compare your intervention against an ideal world and claim that "it would have worked, if only for those darned humans!"

> Basically was relying on self reporting. If a student contracted and was asymptomatic, not shown here, etc.

A great many of the pro-mask papers in 2020 that claimed to "prove" that masks work started from self-reported data (the infamous "hairdressers" CDC report comes to mind...if a customer was asymptomatic, they were ignored; there was no control, so it's impossible to know what would have happened otherwise; etc.) The standards for "proof" across the pandemic have been dismally low, and tribalism and politics have supplanted science.

The difference here is that we actually have examples from across the globe where kids weren't masked in schools, and no matter how you look at it, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. If we're going to be skeptical (we should!) let's be skeptical of every claim, and demand proof of effectiveness for our medical interventions before imposing them across all of human society.

This is like saying antibiotics don’t work because many people don’t complete their course of treatment.

It depends what you are looking at. "Do antibiotics work?" is a slightly different question than "Is prescribing antibiotics effective?".

Of course you'd want data on how people actually take them, because to make decisions you'd like to know if the result means "prescribing antibiotics just doesn't work" or "we need to figure out how to make sure people actually take the prescribed antibiotics effectively"

Exactly. A more apt analogy would be the hypothesis "do antibiotics reduce the prevalence of MRSA, if prescribed for everyone?"

We can know that antibiotics work, but still fail spectacularly when used improperly. It's important to test both.

I'm not sure how 21% lower is considered "not statistically significant", in trying to suppress the spread, ANYTHING > 0% is helpful. Full stop.

1) Is your government adopting a comprehensives and realistic plan to achieve zero covid? (Such a policy must include 100% international travel shut-down, zero exceptions. If there are exceptions, your government does not have a zero covid policy.)

2) Is ICU or hospital usage approaching capacity in your area?

If the answer to those questions is both "no" (as it is in my jurisdiction which is requiring school kids to mask) then your statement is not true. A 21% lower incident rate is not helpful at all, everyone will still all get exposed to covid eventually.

If we can keep kids from catching it for another few months, they can get the vaccine. That’s a huge benefit.

The net-benefit of the vaccine in kids is likely to be borderline at best. That is because 1) kids are already at very, very low risk from covid 2) the side effects of the vaccine seem to be as bad or worse in the young in healthy 3) actually getting the virus allows the immune system to see a much more complete picture of the virus which may lead to better long term immunity. The kid who actually gets the real thing may end up having a better chance of being protected at age 25 or 45 than the kid who just gets the vaccine. See this article for some discussion of this issue: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58270098

> anti-vax site summation of the report?

New York Magazine is an “anti-vax site?”

Looking at the authors listed contributions to that site, he specifically appears to have a distinct bias and railing very specifically on something near and dear to him.

https://nymag.com/author/david-zweig/

7 articles about kids/scool/covid in last year, and one "asking the question" if vaccine is causing a dangerous heart condition in young men.

There's an intuitive model that makes some sense of this finding: Masks, air filters, and distancing are effective at preventing transmission by reducing -- not eliminating -- viral load. What suffices to prevent infection from a 15-second encounter with a stranger in line at the supermarket, may not be enough when kids are in the same room breathing the same air 6 hours of every day.

We now know what it takes to protect a person from COVID in an environment where they are likely to be exposed to significant virus concentrations; unfortunately, getting kids to scrub up like COVID ward nurses is probably not realistic.

> leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it.

The problem is that we're dealing with "if it save even one child's life it's worth it" (for any "it") reasoning, which is impossible to argue against.

> The science here is still uncertain, but leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it

The science is uncertain but leaning towards masking children at schools being worth it. The fact that a study that included mask intervention in Georgia schools showed a double digit percent reduction in community transmission but was underpowered to be statistically significant by itself should not cause us to update beliefs very much, let alone update them in the direction of the null hypothesis, let alone update them all the way to the null hypothesis as Zweig has done, given that our priors are informed by CERN simulations, mechanistic experiments, and adult transmission studies that demonstrate effectiveness. That just demonstrates Zweig's poor understanding of statistics terminology.

Would note that the report found 21% reduced risk of infection in required mask use for students vs optional. Not considered statistically significant because the confidence interval included 1.0. (CI was 0.50 - 1.08)

One could argue that an increased sample size would yield a statistically significant result, and on the flip side another could argue that the effect size would be minimal if you need a larger sample size.

The rebuke, of course, is that even one extra case could kill a loved one that the kid would spread disease on to.

Personally, perhaps reframing the argument that one should wear a mask at school so that they shouldn't have to wear one at home would be a more compelling argument, but I suspect many would disagree..

The author of the article doesn't understand science:

"Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective."

No! If you cannot find a statistically significant benefit, perhaps your experiment design is flawed. Perhaps your sample size is too small. Perhaps you have too many confounders. But you cannot conclude the measures are not effective!

It gets better! Read the article. It says:

"COVID-19 incidence was 37% lower in schools that required teachers and staff members to use masks and 39% lower in schools that improved ventilation. Ventilation strategies associated with lower school incidence included dilution methods alone (35% lower incidence) or in combination with filtration methods (48% lower incidence)."

In other words, the study actually found many significant interventions in schools, among which masks. Unbelievably bad reporting from Intelligencer.

> No! If you cannot find a statistically significant benefit, perhaps your experiment design is flawed. Perhaps your sample size is too small. Perhaps you have too many confounders. But you cannot conclude the measures are not effective!

You’re misreading the article. He’s not saying they’re not effective. He’s saying that a high-powered study couldn’t prove them effective, which is the same thing you’re saying.

The measured difference in community transmission between masks required and masks voluntary was 21%. This was not statistically significant because it was underpowered, as GP correctly stated. Saying that no statistical significance means null hypothesis is a kind of type 2 error, which was difficult to make given that the point estimate did not even support his claim.

I'm frankly surprised that Zweig made such an embarrassingly simple public mistake that any statistician could have pointed out to him had he bothered to ask. His readers might not have that kind of access, but he certainly could get this answered in five minutes.

He didn’t say that no statistical significance meant the null and expressly addressed the point you’re making:

> It’s also important to underline that just because the Georgia study did not find a statistically significant benefit doesn’t mean that a larger, more statistically powerful study might not find one, said Hoeg, the epidemiologist. But since this study had 90,000 students, then the question becomes: If you need 500,000 or 1 million people to find a benefit, how marginal is that benefit?

You seem to be misreading his conclusion. He’s not saying “masking children doesn’t work.” His point is that the practice carries significant potential downsides for children, and the best real-world study we have failed to provide affirmative support that those are outweighed by statistically significant reductions in COVID transmission.

It’s the same thing the FDA does—if your drug fails to show statistically significant efficacy in testing that means you don’t get approval.

I did not see any statistically significant effect measuring the significant downsides on children. Perhaps why you added "potential??

When Zweig says, "If you need 500,000 or 1 million people to find a benefit, how marginal is that benefit?" that means that he doesn't realize that a 21% point estimate in that study with 0% in the error bar means that 42% is also in the error bar. This is not marginal! The point estimate is not marginal either, so when Zweig says that requiring a larger study size means that the effect is marginal, he is either being intentionally deceiving, or he does not understand statistics. I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

> if your drug fails to show statistically significant efficacy in testing that means you don’t get approval.

He doesn't make that point, but that one is also rather silly. If all of our evidence suggests mask effectiveness among elementary school students (some by mechanism, some by simulation, and some by evaluating mask policies on other groups), including the study he pointed to, the correct decision is to require masks for elementary school students. The harms are negligible, and the benefits for reducing community spread are large. The risk for approving an ineffective drug is far larger.

Elsewhere, you made the point that we don't know if masks should be required for toddlers. That I agree with, but that isn't a point that Zweig has made.

If an effect size of 21% is not statistically significant, the test is underpowered.

What is absolutely undisputed is that the primary mechanism for covid spread is airborne out of the nose and mouth.

Not entirely true. Switzerland is starting to mandate masks for kids in schools again because current numbers show that kids (again) are a thriving factor for infections.

> It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.

It doesn't really boggle my mind, it's just that the conclusions it suggests about fellow Americans are really hard to swallow. There is a lot of political polarization in the US and cranking through the implications and reasons for ostensibly pro-COVID policies and attitudes is really disheartening. It's a schism that isn't healed easily.

If anything, an impersonal virus, an implacable, impossible-to-anthropomorphize, zero-upside health hazard could have easily been something for the entire world to unite against. Instead, we got more and deeper division and louder and more extreme and more destructive arguments. And we lost a lot of people and maimed even more. And the reason that couldn't happen: Money. The economy. Me. Freedumbs!

COVID exposed people's real priorities and objectives and showed how craven and myopic our political leaders really are.

If they’re spending the whole day in a classroom together the effect of masks is going to be minimal.

That's simply not what the research has found.

Edit: Allow me to clarify - the research everyone is citing that says masking is effective in teachers and ineffective in students (the 37% number) predates both the delta variant and widespread infection in Southern states. Further, masking is understood etiologically as a prevention method and has been used successfully in other outbreaks and in other countries. Clinicians and policy makers as a rule work with incomplete data in an emerging situation, so unequivocally stating that masking kids in schools doesn't help is a very bad misrepresentation of both the data/research and the implications to policy.

Can you provide a source?

My understanding was that masks were primarily effective at preventing high viral load droplets from spreading the virus during short interactions.

I don't have any source to prove that to be the case because data on the effectiveness of masks seems frustratingly sparse.

When a novel situation presents itself, sometimes we do not have all of data we would like and clinicians have to make judgement calls to the best of their knowledge.

We may not have trials or studies (these things take time) to back a very certain and/or specific claim such as "do masks prevent the spread of Covid 19?" What we do have, is fundamental knowledge and common sense and so typically, in a clinical setting we ask these questions when any new situation arises (as it happens often in medicine):

- Does this reccomendation cause more harm than good?

- is there even a slight chance that this clinical decision would increase the percentage chance of survival?

- is it worth the inconvenience it could cause?

This is called Clinical Reasoning. Thinking critically and clinically is a core tenet of the field.

I don't disagree with anything you said, and I'm certainlynot an anti-masker, but was skeptical of the parent claim which seems to be

"Research shoes masks are still effective even when spending the whole day in the same room"

I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case and I worry that people are putting too much stake in masks when really social distancing is much more effective than masks ever will be.

Keep in mind the initial dose is highly relevant to the impact of the virus in your body. There's a big difference between getting a single virus, enough to cause an infection, and enough to be highly overwhelmed before your immune system kicks in.

There is no real scientific evidence that disease severity is correlated with initial viral dose. It's a plausible hypothesis but so far due to ethical concerns no one has done the human challenge trials that would be necessary to settle that issue.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8045461/

This is a common attribute of infections and is really more of a math issue than anything SARS-specific. The bigger the initial dose, the sooner it will get to the impact stage, and the less prepared your immune system will be at that time.

Got a few here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 It does note that non-medical (e.g. cloth) masks may be less effective, but whether those are used a lot seems to depend on environment (nobody seems to use them here). Edit: One more for cloth masks https://www.nature.com/articles/jes201642

Here's an NPR article discussing a CDC study which found no statistically significant impact from kids wearing masks in school: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999106426/schools-are-droppin...

Key paragraph: Between Nov. 16 and Dec. 11, researchers found that infection rates were 37% lower in schools where teachers and staff members were required to wear masks. The difference between schools that did and did not require students to wear masks was not statistically significant.

A good recent article in NY Mag also discussing this issue, including the fact that the World Health Organization recommends against masking kids under six: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski...

Many countries in Europe have decided against masking for any students in K-12 schools because it is unclear that the harms outweigh the benefits. The idea there is some "simple" scientific & research consensus on this is wrong.

Minimal <> doesn’t help

Is it worth the cost? That’s a different question.

I’m not really opposed to masks in a classroom as a mitigation method, but if people believe it will significantly alter the trajectory of the infections I have a bridge to sell them.

Masks is too broad of a term as being used. There are OSHA environments where proper N95-type masks can protect you from aerosol risks for 8 hours a day.

The likelihood that a cloth mask can do that in a classroom however…

Best mitigator would be good HEPA room air purifiers, ideally multiple per classroom.

> Best mitigator would be good HEPA room air purifiers, ideally multiple per classroom.

They can be too loud to run while class is in session, especially if they move enough air to be worth a damn. Double-especially if you're also masked (so speaking is already a bit muffled).

Why don't we shift classes to be outside and swap summer and winter for now?

I've got a couple of Coway HEPA purifiers, and they can be quiet enough for a classroom. At low speeds, the closest to inaudible that I've ever heard, and at higher speeds a very even and tolerable white/brown noise.

I'm sure some that are good-enough and not loud exist, and some classrooms probably have them, but I can also say for a fact that some schools that have managed to get ahold of good purifiers for every classroom haven't also managed to get ahold of quiet good purifiers, which is why those schools only run them part of the time. It's another hurdle to the solution of "just filter the air", which isn't per se a bad idea—but, whoever's procuring them must think to look into the noise when choosing which to buy, must have the budget to buy quiet ones that move as much air as appropriately-effective louder models (I assume there's a cost premium for "quiet and also effective"), and if someone's already bought purifiers and they're too loud, you're out of luck on getting anyone to pony up cash for a second set of (maybe even more expensive) purifiers.

We seem to be forgetting something here: the aerosols we are protecting from are from other peoples nose and mouth, which are covered by a cloth mask which vastly reduces how much makes it into the air.

There is no "best" here, mitigations all mitigate different things and work together to provide a safer environment.

> which are covered by a cloth mask which vastly reduces how much makes it into the air

Where do you think the extra air goes?

It still makes it into the air, just in different directions. Some of the viral particles are probably caught in the mask, but I’m not sure how much of the total we can count on.

Yeah, you are correct of course. I’m using the general public definition of what constitutes a mask.

Specifically, anything that covers your mouth.

If we had enough N95 masks to give to everyone (and they’d actually wear them) we could stop the virus within a few weeks :P

Hell, just switching to surgical masks would make a ton of difference.

We would need masks for pets though, and wild deer…

Here's one of the scientists on President Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS.

TLDR: To get the sort of protection people imagine that cloth masks provide, you would need to be wearing an n95 mask, tightly fitted to your face so no air leaks in through the sides.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

But what's the actual effectiveness of most people wearing their normal cloth masks?

It doesn't have to personally protect you at high effectiveness from getting infected to reduce spread at a population level.

Even a 50% reduction in spread is huge in a population. Maybe we aren't getting that with masks, but it's not a binary "you are protected"/"you are not protected" problem.

From the interview:

>Needless to say, masking is political hot button beyond anything I've ever seen in public health.

At the same time i think we've all done a disservice to the public.

When you actually look at face cloth coverings, they actually only have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out.

Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.

I've been really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking can do or not do.

On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.

The bottom line though is by telling people that in fact just putting a face cloth covering on is going to protect you is simply not true.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

Cloth masks are nowhere near good enough protection to allow children too young to be vaccinated to return to school.

I agree.

I'm just asking if we have info on population spread effects for masks / no masks.

"Masks won't protect you" isn't an answer to that question. I don't wear a mask when requested by local guidelines or businesses as some kind of guarantee that I don't get COVID.

And yes, having kids not all go to school and then return to their families on a daily basis would probably have a much bigger affect on community spread. But if we can't get political will for masks or vaccinations then I don't know where we're going to find it for another round of kids staying home.

> Masks won't protect you" isn't an answer to that question.

The answer to the question is that cloth masks are effective against viruses with a droplet based spread, but not against a fully airborne virus.

Note that cloth masks almost completely did away with last year's Flu season, while we were right in the middle of a huge Covid surge.

If you think the number of flu cases last year was actually 0 I have a bridge to sell you.

>Amid COVID-19 pandemic, flu has disappeared in the US

NEW YORK (AP) — February is usually the peak of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals packed with suffering patients. But not this year.

Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record,” according to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

https://apnews.com/article/flu-has-disappeared-us-pandemic-2...

Zero flu deaths reported during this season in Washington

https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/zero-f...

Even a 50% reduction in spread is huge in a population. Maybe we aren't getting that with masks, but it's not a binary "you are protected"/"you are not protected" problem.

A 50% reduction and we still all get covid. It is actually binary -- either we have a realistic and obtainable plan for zero-covid (which we do not) or everyone gets exposed to covid eventually.

A 50% reduction in spread might be helpful in certain areas where the hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed (in which case just close the schools for a few weeks), but in the United States there are a lot of mask mandates in schools being pushed in areas where the hospitals are not under any significant pressure. That is nonsense.

One issue is that with exponential curves it's often difficult to make these big policy changes as local conditions change.

Sure in an ideal world as soon as hospitalizations or case rates went above some metric we'd introduce stricter local procedures, hopefully fast enough that the wave of hospitalizations 1-2 weeks later isn't too bad.

But so far it seems like we're too slow on that. Things get bad, then we start changing our behavior. Time matters and it's not binary. That's been the whole principle of managing this thing in the US at the beginning. If you let the spike get too big too quickly then it gets bad before we can take corrective action.

And how would we even manage changing these guidelines on a week-by-week basis in every zip code? How do you even disseminate that information to all businesses, citizens, parents?

Of course I don't think all restrictions make sense in all places, nor do I want them to go on forever. Vaccinations for a large majority of eligible individuals would go a long way to reducing spread and hospitalization load.

In theory we are trying to bide time until we get there (manageable COVID, not zero COVID) but in the US at least we're not heading towards "large majority" very quickly, and we are still having those exponential local spikes.

Something like 30% (of expelled particles) when we’re talking about face-to-face contact for a few minutes.

Probably pretty close to zero when we’re talking about being in a classroom with 30 other kids for a few hours. The mask protects against things going straight ahead, not against slowly filling up a room with aerosols.

I guess masking up might mean everyone gets slowly infected over the course of days though (through aerosols), instead of getting a full dose of virus straight in the face. I presume that affects the severity of the subsequent disease.

I appreciate the simplicity of the message to mask up, since it’s almost certainly better than nothing, but it’s no panacea.

The masks part is easy.. it has no effect..

We have been on and off masks here in Denmark, and it seems to have no effect on spread. Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one.. from a family member or a friend..

Thanks for the downvotes.. still wont make the masks work. Get vaccinated.

Isn’t this a contradiction?

“Masks don’t work” and then in the next paragraph “mostly you get COVID when not wearing [a mask]”

Only if you truncate the sentence as you have done.

Can you help me understand how “catching COVID while not wearing a mask” is meaningfully different from “catching COVID from a family member while not wearing masks” in the context of whether masks are effective in preventing the spread of COVID? Seems an irrelevant distinction to me.

I think:

You’re not catching covid in situations where you’d typically wear a mask (regardless of masking), rather where you typical don’t wear a mask, like from family member.

I’m not really saying I agree, but I think that is the context.

I think this works like condom statistics, where the statistic is that they are 98% effective, but that statistic includes people who go "we normally wear condoms, but we didn't that one time and she got pregnant" as a condom failure.

So basically, the masks are effective, but people take the masks off around family and friends and if one of their friends or family has COVID they will pass it on during the unmasked time.

It has a quite an effect.

If you notice at the moment the corona numbers are high in Netherlands and Denmark while low in Germany.

Because Germany has kept more restrictions in place, in particular mask wearing in shops and transport.

You can cite 100 counterexamples when using this simplistic kind of reasoning. Covid numbers are quite high in South Korea and Japan which both have sky-high mask compliance, for example.

Isn't that part of the scientific process? Is there some other way to come to the truth aside from observation and examining variables related to the observed outcomes?

Correlation is not causation. Just because “cases went down” doesn’t mean masks (or lockdowns) were responsible for the drop.

The case count for Germany atm is very impressive, but we ditched masks in June, and cases actually plummeted after that, and only started to rise with the delta variant. We still compared to most have a low infection rate.

There is nothing to support the theory that shops are hotspots for spread, if that was true alot of supermarket employees etc, would have been infected, at a larger rate than average. However this has not happened anywhere.

"Compared with a baseline of 1-foot separation with no masks employed, particle count was reduced by 84% at 3 feet of separation and 97% at 6 feet. A modest decrease in particle count was observed when only the receiver was masked. The most substantial exposure reduction occurred when the aerosol source was masked (or both parties were masked). When both the source and target were masked, particle count was reduced by more than 99.5% of baseline, regardless of separation distance or which type of mask was employed."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00256...

We no longer believe that Covid is spread by large droplets that will fall to the ground within six feet of being sneezed or coughed out. Cloth masks catch those droplets just fine.

We now know that Covid is spread by minute particles so small that they float on the air for hours. Cloth masks do not filter the air you breathe from particles of that size.

You would need an n95 mask or better to do that job.

Remember that mask wearing almost completely did away with last year's Flu season while we simultaneously had a huge Covid surge.

> You would need an n95 mask or better to do that job.

And not just that but you have to wear it properly. This means if you have a beard, you better shave it.

Indeed. If you need to filter out tiny particles from the air you breathe, you can't allow unfiltered air to leak in and out through the sides of the mask.

>Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.

On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

There's even speculation that low quality masks create selective pressure for higher binding affinity to ACE2. We should all be wearing N95s...

What if we gave N95 masks to everyone? Several countries have mandated N95 or FFP/equivalent masks. America can afford it.

All the pro-mask studies are like this: Some simulated situation that doesn't take into account whether spread actually happens like that in real life.

They can simulate blowing stuff through various types of filter material all they want, it doesn't change that none of the epidemiological curves reacted to mask mandates anywhere.

They do work great as an ideological symbol though, thanks to the topic's polarisation.

There remain differences of opinion among scientists on how effective non-medical masks are in reducing COVID-19 transmission.

However, on the question of medical-grade masks, there is clear research that now shows some masks (e.g. FFP3 masks) are effective in stopping COVID-19 infection.

Covid: Masks upgrade cuts infection risk, research finds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57636360

> The masks part is easy.. it has no effect..

> Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one..

The conclusion I would draw from your own beliefs here is that we should be wearing masks all the time, especially around family... not that masks don't work.

Personally while I wear a mask most of the time when out, I do feel that we really don't know as much as we'd like to think about mask efficacy. The trouble is your own reasoning here is inconsistent. Either masks don't work as well as we think and risk of infection is equally likely in public or at home, or they do work effectively but we don't wear them at important times.

The argument you should have from your own beliefs here should be for more mask wearing not less.

> it seems to have no effect on spread

We wore them for a year. Covid is still here. It won't go away if we wear them for another year. It won't go away if we wear them for another ten years.

And it might be a shocker to some, but there is more to life than myopically focusing on slowing the spread of exactly one disease. We have the rest of our lives to worry about. Expecting society to live a covid centric lifestyle where all that matters is “does it slow the spread” for 1.6 years and counting is does not make for a mentally healthy population.

> We wore them for a year. Covid is still here.

That sounds like an argument against bullet proof vests. People still die while wearing them. LEO have been wearing them for years. Obviously, they don't work.

You don't understand the actual goal of wearing masks: protected people and reducing the spread of covid. It's not going to magically eliminate covid when half the country doesn't actually wear them.

> LEO have been wearing them for years

So in other words, your expectation is that we'll be wearing masks for the rest of our lives?

Is it going to be a deadly disease without treatment nor vaccines for the rest of our lives?

Do LEO wear them 24/7 or only in appropriate situations?

Are there any studies into the effects of being infected by multiple of these viruses at the same time? Or is this just what your doctor has told you? Also what do kids under 12 have to do with any of this?

Studies will take time. That said:

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027663917/rsv-covid-children

> At Texas Children's Hospital in Houston on Thursday, 25 of 45 hospitalized pediatric patients were diagnosed with RSV as well as COVID-19. "A hospitalization rate much higher than for either virus alone," according to officials.

> At the moment there is little data available on the impact of contracting both viruses and whether the two together can make a person sicker. But health officials worry it could put young patients — who are not eligible for the vaccine — at greater risk.

Interesting but until there is some real data around this personally I would rather see people who we know are at risk, elderly in poorer countries, get the vaccine over under 12s in first world countries. That's just my opinion though

Would be interested to see the exact breakdown here. If 19 children are hospitalized with RSV+Covid, 5 with just RSV, and 1 with just Covid, it could just indicate RSV is particularly virulent for children and they are likely to also have Covid given they have been exposed to RSV. This would certainly fit with what we already know about the relative risks posed to children by RSV vs Covid.

This article from the Guardian suggests that the reason RSV is having an off-season surge is because children now have an "immunity debt" from being isolated as part of Covid protocols. It would probably not be a good idea not for us to double down on the measures that have brought us to this point. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/new-zealand-ch...

Good thread by an MD here discussing these issues and saying that coinfection rates are 50% for kids: https://twitter.com/contrarian4data/status/14298548764151316...

Only recently did we reach the threshold where the majority believes in evolution, as opposed to "God created everything".

> mandating kids to wear masks in schools

There's no evidence that wearing masks prevents contracting Covid (or any other airborne virus). It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it, but if you already have it, the schools send you home anyway. It's also not as if masks are themselves neutral either - constant mask wearing is associated with higher rates of bacterial pneumonia. Even medical professionals never wore masks all day (until last year), just when they were performing surgery.

> It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it, but if you already have it, the schools send you home anyway

Most of the schools that do testing due so weekly. With delta someone can be contagious up to 36 hours after infection. That means someone who gets tested on Friday morning, goes to a poorly ventilated party with a COVID-19+ that evening and returns to school on Monday could spread the disease for a week.

> There's no evidence that wearing masks prevents contracting Covid (or any other airborne virus). It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it

What you just described is the same thing, it's simply a matter of perspective. If you wear a mask, it helps me by reducing the chances that you spread it to me if you have it but aren't experiencing symptoms yet. It works the same way in reverse. I don't wear a mask to protect myself, I wear it to protect others in the case that I'm shedding virus and don't know it yet.

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