The case against masks at school

Keeping with that perspective, those coming to the hospital with Covid that goes untreated are more likely to die in the next 30 days than those who come in with cancer that goes untreated. That's the calculus being played out. They're hoping to get through these waves and then get back to the patients who weren't facing as immediate a health threat.

What's really bothering my medical friends, and I suspect may be the source of so much burnout, is the prevalence of willful ignorance. They see it as a majority of the unvaccinated are people who should know better - that's what's making this so tough for them. They knew there would be cranks and crackpots who wouldn't get the vaccine because there always are. They weren't expecting it to be this prevalent and they certainly weren't expecting it to be politicized. The whole situation is demoralizing and causing people to reassess their life choices.

I think if you drop off the rails of a traditional lifestyle, you need to be ready to stand on your own two feet a little more when it comes to intrinsic motivation.

Watch the widely circulated video of the Florida's nomination hearing for their new Surgeon General, where a democrat asks the nominee if he, yes or no, believes the vaccines to be effective. It was asked five times, his answers were nothing but stuttering, rambling, dissembling, meandering madness ('i mean what does effective actually mean' level bullshit). The republicans passed him out of committee once the democrats walked out in frustration.

We have a party that is in full denial mode because that's what their anti-vax constituents want to hear. The only upside might be that their vote share goes down because their constituents die in higher numbers.

Also you need to update your Sam Harris stats, its not 40% unvaccinated anymore like some outlets continue to harp on, check CDC numbers, its closer to only 20% of the population remaining.

[0]: https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#ethnicity-gender-age

But before you seek medical treatment we’ll just need you to fill out this questionnaire:

1. Have you ever had an alcoholic beverage?

2. Do you have a BMI greater than 18.5?

3. Have you ever eaten at The Cheesecake Factory?

4. Do you ride, run, or swim less than 40 miles per day?

Please understand that your answers may disqualify you from eligibility for healthcare. Thank you, Acme Excellence Health Partners.

https://twitter.com/orwell2022/status/1486330027549544452

Sure, you can deny some people medical treatment if you want to reduce the load on the hospital by a bit but it does not go away!

I believe that it's common for kids to wear masks during flu season in some countries. They probably have some relevant data.

I think there's a belief that strict adherence to vaccination and masks would get us to a place where we won't need masks all the time, and kids can resume their usual immune-system adventures. That might be less realistic than we might want. I don't know.

So I think it's possible that precautions reduce viral and bacterial exposure, but since they don't completely stop it, immune systems may still get enough exposure to build immunity to things while still not getting enough exposure to actually make them sick.

But they also do weekly testing. And did surveillance testing at the end of winter break, which kept about 15% of the school's students at home for the first week back because they had covid.

This statistic was also consistent with LA Unified surveillance testing after winter break - about 15%.

Before winter break, some parents of 2nd graders had an indoor, maskless, holiday party. Apparently all the kids got covid. Then gave it to the teachers - all 4 2nd grade teachers were out of school with covid the week before winter break. But from what our school's testing showed, it didn't spread beyond that.

I do know of a couple families who did seem to get covid from their school though.

The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. Virtually zero of those kids that died was healthy before they caught COVID. The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks.... it's almost like maybe, just maybe, you've let your brain get hijacked by a mass panic and are refusing to acknowledge reality now, because that would require you to admit you've completely overreacted, and have done damage to children in the process. I don't blame you for not wanting to admit that to yourself, but at some point this has to stop.

If you feel like you should wear an N95 properly to be safe then you should do that. But let’s not pretend we can get everyone to properly wear N95s

Universal education is supposed to be the great equaliser. I can't imagine the current state of remote learning achieves that, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to the people who push for schools to re-open in-person. I don't think it's worth people dying over, though, especially given that the qualifications are more important than the stuff you learn in school.

Think about it, what are the reasons making close supervision of school-aged children desirable? Their brains are still growing and developing! They often aren’t mature enough to be academically successful when they’re physically isolated and stuck on a shitty google hangout.

The teachers are trying their best, but the best teacher in the world can't overcome the nature of these problems, and the effects are absolutely compounding over the past couple of years. It's really, really bad.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/online-l...

Sure, the first six months, or even a year can be discounted as an aberration in the child development process and can be compensated for. This is year 3 with no end in sight. Do you even realize how much children develop in 3 years? A 6 year old and a 9 year old have a significant difference in cognitive capabilities and if you stop the learning process, the lifetime effect can be devastating. It doesn’t matter when you’re 30 and have to sit at home, but it absolutely does when you’re a child and your brain is developing.

And based on my long career on the corporate ladder, absolutely no one cares about whether you were a pandemic baby, a child growing up in poverty or pretty much any other non visible handicap in your life. You either know stuff or you don’t.

And since you mentioned World War 2, schools didn’t stop even in WW2, At a time when people didn’t even necessarily need to go to schools to eventually lead a comfortable life.

This is yet another problem that's ignored, swept under the run and "averaged out" as a solution.

There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year. Have others had it worse in history? Sure. But that's like saying if you get run over by a Prius, it doesn't matter because people that got hit by a truck had it worse.

And for all that keeping kids at home, we really didn't gain anything. If you look at places and regions that kept kids in school and compare them to places that shut schools down, there's no discernable difference in outcomes. Because people intermingled anyway. So we could've at least had kids socializing and developing normally for that cost.

How exactly is this better than a consistent schedule from home?

And then the raw data came out and there was a difference of maybe 20 cases.

The gold standard is an RCT, and it failed to show any benefit to masks in general.

Masks work great on mannequins or hamsters but they are essentially useless as a public health measure. We learned this in 1912. I am astonished that so many people still cling to them and claim "masks work" when we have overwhelming data that as a non-pharmaceutical intervention, they really don't. unless 100% of the people wear an N95 24/7.

The masks were well past their usefulness in 2019.

They’re not, they’re one of the best funded schools in the world.

It's much more than that.

The other problem that i've been hearing from my public school teacher friends is that there are so many staff absences due to covid

Sure, and that's happening in schools with and without mask mandates. Unless you go into full hermit mode, you are going to be exposed to Omicron. And if you're young or vaccinated, that's very unlikely to be a big deal.

That total cost may (or may not) still support the decision to have a mask mandate for kids, but let’s not get confused and think the only cost is measured in dollars.

My default assumption would be that if the mask doesn't make it more difficult to breathe then it is unlikely to be effective. The filtration mechanism should introduce friction which you then have to compensate for with additional pressure in your lungs.

And yet we have cardiologists and eye doctors and chiropractors telling the public that the vaccine is dangerous and that we would be better off without it.

I saw someone mentioned that a doctor/professor from Johns Hopkins was raising concerns about college age kids getting vaccinated. I looked him up. He's a surgical oncologist. Guess what the epidemiologists, virologists, and immunologists at Johns Hopkins are recommending?

Oh ya, and the surgical oncologist turned epidemiologist just so happens to have a book about the pandemic that he is pushing right now. I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.

A recent CDC study [0] joins plenty of others from last year in showing that these people were at least as protected from infections and severe outcomes during delta as those who were vaccinated without a prior infection.

Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me.

You've probably spent the last year being told these people are trying to murder your family though, so it also makes sense to me if you don't agree with this.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...

Vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid nor do they stop you from getting Covid.

They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid.

Thus the decision to vax or not is clearly a personal choice.

> STOCKHOLM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Sweden has decided against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11, the Health Agency said on Thursday, arguing that the benefits did not outweigh the risks.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...

I'm not super well versed in the science but it seems like reasonable parties advise against vaccination in certain scenarios. Also knowing that government bodies are more likely to prioritize group outcomes over individual outcomes it seems reasonable for individuals to be skeptical.

This is exactly backwards from reality. The groups you mentioned are at much higher risk from covid and ergo it is much more important to vaccinate. The risk in absolute terms will remain much higher even with vaccination but this is a poor reason not to vaccinate. The reason you vaccinate is the degree of risk mitigated not the expectation of reducing that risk to zero.

and you think this is an experience unique to your viewpoint? do you think the people reading your words who have vaguely opposing views might not also be fatigued when your group flatly denies their concerns as irrelevant?

if you find yourself in an us-vs-them mindset and decide to ditch empathy, all you do is widen the divide.

It's far more nuanced than that. I have now had three doses of the vaccine, and I had Covid subsequent to the third dose. Israel is now moving on a fourth dose, and the vaccine manufacturers are making an Omicron-specific variant. If my city continues with prior behavior, and mandates a booster for a virus I've now had, am I an "anti-vaxxer" for not wanting the unnecessary dose?

That you're characterizing the situation in this binary way says a lot to how the entire issue has been treated as a cartoon political issue. But many millions of people are in exactly this situation, today (i.e. those who already had Covid, and are now being required to get a vaccine).

Encryption is probably the only thing that most people on HN agree with.

Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia.

Also covid patients only make up 13% of the ICU?

Something is odd with your flattening the curve narrative blaming overflow on Covid patients.

As a result, it will never be possible to know how many died of specifically Covid, and how many died of a viral-induced pneumonia.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

This is wrong, and the reason resolves the seeming problem: “our leadership” never did that. Some people in some places did, many did not, and in many cases they actively worked against it. The experts’ plan works everywhere it’s actually been tried.

I do agree that we need to improve conditions for healthcare workers but that’s slow to train people up and it’d be much easier and faster if we had fewer Republicans driving them out. The politics around basic health measures is the most widely mentioned reason for burnout.

If you're talking about clinics catering to poor populations. Why can't they use their Medicare money?

I'm sorry, I don't trust anything from the AMA because they are a lobbying organization. Why don't I just start sending links to the American Petroleum Institute while we're at it?

Lab/in vitro models are great because they allow for tightly controlled conditions and are clear tests of mechanisms, but they might not represent real-world conditions in living human beings in our social context, with all of the attending quirks and nuances.

Animal models are great because they're a complete organism upon which we can still do a whole range of controlled experiments which we can't do in people. But they're not human beings, so there could be differences there. And we can't control them as closely as e.g. an experiment with a few cells or a few viral particles.

etc. etc.

When all the evidence seems to be pointing in roughly the same direction, I think it's fair to say we know something. That appears to be the case with masks limiting the spread of Covid, even if the confidence intervals on the randomized controlled trials are large. That's very different from "little, if any benefit".

From a Twitter thread by Dr. Claire J. Horwell, Director of International Volcanic Health Hazard Network (IVHHN), Professor at Duram Volcanology – “here's a short thread to answer the question: can you wear a disposable #facemask more than once? The answer is YES. Many manufacturers state that masks should be disposed of after 8 hours but this is not true. […] Unless a mask has become clogged full of particles in a very high exposure scenario (e.g. mining, construction) or the worker is in a contaminated front-line healthcare setting, it is still perfectly useable after 8 hours, unless it is broken.”

https://twitter.com/claire_horwell/status/146640027013763072...

Masks have gigantic effort/inconvenience and mental health costs. I can't think of anything but counting down the seconds until ripping that f*cking thing off my face while being strangled by that shit. Yet nobody cares about anyone else's mental health over their own perceived safety.

Masks make it a lot harder to communicate effectively. People are harder to understand, emotions are harder to read, speaking takes more effort.

If communicating is the main thing you do all day, because you're a teacher for instance, that is a significant inconvenience.

Which is why some of the new omicron studies show cloth masks to be worse than no masks at all.

And partially explains why omicron seems more capable of defeating real world mask use.

You're probably unaware of the high prevalence of fecal bacteria on public surfaces, then.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16134485/

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/mcdonalds-touchscreen-kiosks...

"A study by U.K. newspaper Metro found gut and fecal bacteria on touchscreens in all of the chain’s restaurants it surveyed. It took samples from the screens in eight branches and found that they contained coliform bacteria, a group of microorganisms found in people’s intestines as well as in soil and on plants."

It’s endemic. Its not going away. We are all going to get it. (Me: triple vaxxed, had covid 2x)

Getting vaccinated is a personal heath decision (which I encourage)

Time to move on.

Keeping people locked up at home for a third season is absurd.

We aren't living through a pandemic anymore, we are now living in an endemic. Omicron isn't going away anytime soon - and we can't lock down businesses forever. Omicron can't be stopped by lockdown anyway (see challenges of containing it within China).

Secondly, it is highly unlikely that we would have got rid of Covid-19 even harsher lockdown measures earlier (e.g. see Omicron which happened because the original virus jumped to mice and back to humans - just humans locking down wouldn't have stopped this variant, we would have had to lock down all the rodents too).

My personal view - we have to stop viewing life as nothing but a vector for disease, and stop re-architecting our entire society and culture to avoid Covid infections (at huge societal costs to education, standards of living etc).

It's frankly pretty weird that these comment threads are always so ragey and judgey, let alone the ones on Twitter. Everyone should chill a bit and stop reading the news stories stoking fears - at some point the mental effects are riskier than the physical ones, and I'd say that many in this thread are well past this point.

My psychiatrist, therapist and gp all confirmed this. Frankly, you should trust people with these actual conditions. We are living it, you aren't.

Surely there is, at minimum, an unstated variable here like "effort required to inhale the same volume of air"? Or the composition of the air?

I'm not an expert in this area, but as someone who "feels" like I'm getting less oxygen and is willing to consider that my body is tricking me, help me understand.

edit: I shouldn't have to say this, but I'll mention I'm vaccinated+boosted and have complied with the mask mandates. I just don't understand these unintuitive claims.

It causes a great amount of anxiety for me, and literally feels like torture. I don't care about what lung volume/blood oxygen "studies" say.

Huh? From https://weintraubcenter.dentistry.ucla.edu/n95-respirators-t...

>Pressure drop is a measure of the resistance that the air meets as it flows through the respirator filter and into the mask. This is important because the pressure drop affects the comfort and breathability of the mask- specifically a lower pressure drop is desirable as it translates to increased breathability and thus comfort.

> On average, those that have high filtration efficiency are also the ones with the largest pressure drop, which make it difficult to breath.

I'm aware not everyone is wearing a N95 or better respirator, but the metric applies to all masks.

Depends on how you measure it and what you mean by physiologically detect. Generally, the resistance of breathing through a ("good") mask is not automatically detectable, but does exist and one could detect it if they are attentive. Your body tends to increase tidal volume and/or respiration rate because of the rebreathing of the stale under the mask. There are certainly studies that measure the physiological effects, such that we set 15 minute and 8 hour limits on CO2 exposure etc.

Granted it's largely not an issue, but it's not necessarily correct to say that it offers no restriction and no physiological changes.

You're breathing in less air, and more CO2. There is no way it's not going to have an impact.

https://ktvz.com/news/coronavirus/2021/04/26/summit-hs-runne...

it should be beyond obvious to any neutral observer that putting a covering over one's nose and mouth will affect their breathing airflow, especially so when exercising. you don't even have to try it yourself to intuit this, it's just common sense. but once you have tried it, there should be zero doubt in your mind that your breathing airflow is affected, especially if you're actually going out of your way to ensure that you've sealed the mask on your face properly.

I don't say this to shame or disparage you specifically, but instead to point out how people, broadly, are having their thoughts programmed, on a massive scale, to truly believe things that are obviously contradictory to reality.

this should be very concerning to everyone.

Most of them (more than 95 percent) received the second dose more than six months before their deaths. As many as 96 percent of them "had other health complications that contributed to their deaths," the PHS report said. Their average age was 78.1 years.

Please do not cherry-pick data that has hidden confounding variables. The data DOES NOT SHOW that vaccinated (but not boosted) are getting sick and dying at higher rates than unvaccinated. You are being severely misleading with your statements as “facts”.

Most importantly “In the last week from 08 January 2022 to 14 January 2022, in an age-standardised population, the COVID-19 related death rate in individuals that received a booster or third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine was between 3.2 to 9.4 times lower than individuals who are unvaccinated or have only received one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.”. That directly contradicts your “fact”, and the reason is the simple one that your numbers are not standardised for age i.e. more older people are vaccinated so more vaccinated people die. This should not need to be repeated ad nausium. Pay attention to the facts and please stop misrepresenting the truth.

From page 34 of that report:

“PLEASE READ BEFORE REVIEWING THE FOLLOWING TABLES AND FIGURES There is a large risk of misinterpretation of the data presented in this section due to the complexities of vaccination data. A blog post by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), formerly Public Health England (PHE), provides a comprehensive explanation of the biases and potential areas for misinterpretation of such data. They state that a simple comparison of COVID-19 case rates in those who are vaccinated and unvaccinated should not be used to assess how effective a vaccine is in preventing serious health outcomes, because there are a number of differences between the groups, other than the vaccine itself, and these biases mean that you cannot use the rates to determine how well the vaccines work. Below are examples of some of the complexities and biases that need to be taken into consideration when interpreting these data. This is explained in more detail in our blog on the PHS website.” And from page 35: “There are likely to be systematic differences and biases between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, such as behaviour, vulnerability and previous infection, that are unaccounted for when comparing rates. As most of the population is vaccinated, these differences become more evident and could create bias in case/hospitalisation/death rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated population.”

So with this one I wonder if the mildness of omicron is due to previous infection/vaccination than the virus itself being mild. Like if omicron came into the scene in 2020 it would have been just as deadly but more infectious. I don't know for certain if this is true but was something I was thinking.

As for this I 100% agree:

> This is something that is in all likelihood not variant-specific. In other words, cloth masks were always ineffective, however with the increased transmissibility of Omicron, this fact of ineffectiveness has become readily apparent.

> The rates in Table 15 should not be used as a measures of vaccine effectiveness due to unaccounted for biases and risk factors.

The age-standardized morality rates you mentioned are for just the week of Jan 8-14 (though the same pattern is visible for earlier weeks). But, you didn't mention 3-dose stats with show the opposite pattern:

- Unvaccinated: 16/1.5m raw; 10/100k age adj

- 2-dose: 33/1m raw; 14/100k age adj

- 3-dose: 71/3m raw; 1.5/100k age adj

You can't infer the protectiveness of vaccination in elders directly from this age-adjusted mortality data because Scotland has 100% 2+ dose coverage in those age 60+. The unvaccinated group only includes people under 60 while the vaccinated group includes both. You have to use other observations to judge the protective effect.

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/phs.covid.19/viz/COVI...

(In reality the number is a bit under 100% because the denominator and the numerator are not linked together. They're tracking sum totals, not individual people.)

Meanwhile, the medical group I work for in Seattle is being absolutely swamped by patients being transferred from overwhelmed hospital and urgent care facilities in Pierce and Thurston counties. We've had to stop doing anything but COVID-related care and the only reason we have the capacity to do that is because we don't operate an emergency room so we can't take on the worst-of-the-worst cases.

According to our daily COVID update report, we have a handful of patients who gave residence addresses--we ask for this because the county and state departments of health want it for statistics, among other reasons--inside Seattle and just a few more inside King County.

It's a very stressful time for many of us, and it isn't helped by the disparity in level of care, let's say, over COVID prevention measures even inside the region.

People ripping down mask signs, spitting on people, arguing at the doors to a store, etc.

So I drove over to their place and they leant me some stuff, we were all paranoid so they left the stuff in the garage, I drove up, waved to them on the porch and loaded up my car and headed home. I did need to stop and get gas before getting back on the freeway, at the gas station there was a little mini-mart. There were four people inside, none of them had a mask on. The gas station is next to a Denny's or similar, their dining room was closed but there were people waiting INSIDE and UNMASKED for takeout.

That's why we can't have nice things, even if your town/city collectively was pretty serious about lockdown, the next town over might not be and their citizens are coming into your community to work or whatever else. The only enforcement is the local sherif and if they are a crazy gimme liberty or gimme death type they aren't going to enforce shit.

It's death by a thousand cuts. The piano policy isn't that devastating by itself, but it's one of 50 things that have been taken away.

While true, when someone's dying, skyping not in any way a replacement for being at their side.