I'm willing to be persuaded by evidence, but (for me) any piece that fails to address such an obvious counterpoint immediately loses a great deal of credibility.
Also the minor detail that countries with masking cultures - like Japan - have relatively excellent Covid stats with minimal deaths.
Honestly, we're through the looking glass if we're even pretending there's any kind of debate about this.
Masks work for adults. Period. There are tens of papers proving that now. Any good faith web search will find them. For every cherry picked paper "proving" they don't there are ten much better designed studies proving they do.
If masks work for adults, they work for kids - not just to cut spread between kids, but also between kids and adults, and especially between kids and vulnerable adults.
The UK has decided to have an outbreak of political psychosis over this, and there are already significant - double digit - percentages of both teachers and kids off sick with Covid in many schools.
Risks to kids are relatively insignificant compared to the trauma of lost school friends, lost hours from school, lost relatives and - in too many cases - lost parents.
The promotion of irrational and human-hostile anti-masker anti-vaxxer nonsense really needs to stop.
Instead of fighting a futile battle by trying to prevent exposure we should instead accept that everyone will be exposed and try to maximize their odds of survival. That means encouraging eligible people to get vaccinated, and take other steps to mitigate co-morbid conditions.
The article doesn't mention the other uncomfortable truth--every kid is getting covid sooner rather than later regardless of mask mandates. Even if masks are 50% effective at reducing the spread, Omicron variant is more contagious with a mask than the original variant was without one. And there is little reason to believe masks reduce 50% of spread.
Washington DC infection rate 20X'd in a month. Even if you reduce the slope of the curve, the area under it is going to be roughly the same.
If the masks don't prevent the spread of COVID, or reduce the likelihood of having symptomatic illness, then the long term effects of COVID don't matter in regards to masking arguments.
Pretending that masks on young kids contribute anything to slowing the spread is complete wishful thinking.
I wonder how much of these breathless articles against masking children is more about adults than about the children.
We obviously can't expect healthy children to wear masks forever. That would be absurd and dystopian. So what are the exit criteria?
That said, the most compelling reason to get rid of mask mandates in the school is that they don't work. Kids wear them all over their face. As noted in the article, no one wears good ones, and no one wears them close to correctly. Part of the reason why I suspect we see evidence that teachers masking up is effective while children aren't effective is that teachers are more likely to wear their masks correctly.
With probably only the exception of China, most countries have decided that they will take the latter path, at various degrees of throttling.
Most of the US is at or past the omicron peak, it stopped growing because it’s running out of people to infect. The more cautious people will make up a long fat tail, but it really seems doubtful that anything can be done.
We’ve had 72 million detected cases in the US, if you assume a certain number didn’t test and a big number never knew they had it at all… we are really running out of people to “save” from covid infections. During the national peak, there were something like a million infections a day.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
In Santa Clara County CA wastewater monitoring data indicates that we're past the peak Omicron wave.
The parallel of this example would be an article discussing the evidence for the effectiveness of masking, in which case you would be right -- discussion of long-term effects of COVID wouldn't be necessarily relevant.
But that isn't this article -- this article is discussing policy: should students mask in schools? In which case, weighing the long-term effects of covid is absolutely relevant.
Children need facial expressions to read the emotions of teachers/peers and are important part of their development. So forcing them to wear mask impede that part of development. Now its up to you to decide whats more important.
Just to support the point. There are videos of mother interacting with a very toddler everything normal, then she is told to hold steady and neural face all the time. The baby quickly notices and becomes increasingly distressed.