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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

>the COVID situation in Florida, which has been steadily improving ever since schools opened

There have been articles about how Florida recently switched to reporting deaths with the date of death, so it seems that it will continually appear that the rate plummeted recently. As time goes by, though, the graph will be filled in. Maybe people are being deceived by this.

>pointless hygiene theater at this point

You can be blasé about covid-19 and masks or not, you can be distrustful of all the random "experts" or not, but if you are, then it's "pointless theater" squared to spend time, money, and energy arguing, debating publicly, and fighting in court on exactly what we should do. It doesn't matter!

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We're a year and half in at this point, and I've been masking throughout because I thought it would make a difference, plus I live in a country where it's compulsory anyway.

However, I've yet to see a peer-reviewed, statistically significant study about non-medical mask use in social settings having a measurable effect. If you have any pointers, I'm all ears.

I found this list of 40+. The second one seems to fit your criteria https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-her...

I remember reading that cloth masks may even be worse than no masks because while they stop large particles they also aerosolize the virus. They provide nearly no protection for the wearer. Don’t have the reference any more as I’ve long switched to surgical/FFP2, but this matches policy in central Europe.

Psychological harm caused by forcing mask on young children is well documented. So forcing something on them that has no positive effect matters a lot.

Citation needed. My anecdotal evidence of my four year old not giving a crap about wearing a mask disagrees with you.

More than an active shooter drill?

They've experienced greater psychological harm by having their parents and grandparents get COVID.

Basically the only place masks are a good idea is where the captive audience can't be vaccinated, which happens to be schools.

In the US somewhere around 50,000 children lost a parent or guardian. Couple of million lost a grandparent. I've known a higher than average number of people who lost a parent when they were children or teenagers. That's bad in a lot of different ways and has a life long impact. So I find people trivializing that to be gross and utterly appalling.

It is tragic but what this has to do with forcing kids to wear mask? Sweden hit zero COVID death months ago, even though they never closed elementary schools and did not require masks. Children bear an incredibly small health risk with respect to the virus. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics suggests “children continue to face a far greater risk of critical illness from influenza than from COVID-19. In addition, children are unlikely to spread the virus. The WHO’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, recently told the BBC that children appear to be “less capable” of spreading the virus than adults. In addition, the WHO has not observed any significant outbreaks that can be linked to regular school attendance.

Masks help prevent the flu as well, for the record.

Given quarantine policies for exposures the easiest way to keep kids in schools is to make sure the adults around them are vaccinated and that they take precautions before then.

My state effectively hit zero Covid deaths too a few months ago and that was through vaccination.

> In addition, children are unlikely to spread the virus.

That is something you have choose to believe.

Or not.

Epidemiologists and public health officials disagree with you on that.

They weren't trivializing losing a parent; they were trivializing wearing a mask by comparing it to losing a parent. Or a teacher, I guess.

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