Pediatric COVID19 Cases in Counties with and Without School Mask Requirements

Key conclusion: "observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables."

Surprisingly few interventions are so good that you don't need fancy statistics to justify them. Really good treatments (e.g. antibiotics) are so effective as to be obvious to all.

I don't understand why people would have believed otherwise in the first place.

It's clear that masks are effective at preventing transmission for passing encounters. But I have operated under the assumption that if you are sharing space with someone for 8 hours a day - you're basically still going to spread Covid.

Yes, masking works in degrees. It's not hard to understand that.

Where schools break down, however, is during lunchtime. Kids - like adults - drop their masks to eat and drink (of course) and carry on as if there is something magical about holding a sandwich in front of their faces. After 30 minutes of much needed socializing, the masks go back on.

To be clear, at my both of my kids' schools in Seattle masks are 100% voluntary, yet there is a culture to wear them (even on the sidewalks while walking home from school - not joking).

It's not like the masked schools are 100% solid, no, so the tests are wobbly to say the least. Yet, my kids don't sit next to every student in the school during lunch, so their exposure is also teeny tiny. But we're anecdotally seeing cases rise at work and school here in Seattle over the past 3 weeks unlike any time I can remember during the past 2 years. Every area is different... It used to be, "Do you know anyone who has caught it?" And now I know several.

I sometimes think the UK has it right. People there have simply accepted it and deal. They have a big spike every 2 months but carry on with packed pubs, covid be damned.

A large part of this study consists of a review of data from a prior study. That study is here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8486393/

It may be helpful to read them both together. As the authors emphasize, the statistical analysis of these phenomena is quite difficult, but one thing that stuck out to me: there is practically no correlation with population density, before or after controlling for the community vulnerability index.

Studies like this will only be compounded by those attempting to quantify how harmful removing an entire nation's children from school for almost 2 years, to socially isolate them from their community while mongering fear of other people fared against their psychological well being. How many hacker news users were aggressively throwing shade at anyone who deign so much as offer an iota of dissent against the status quo's reaction to mandates? Funny how a dubious analog to shoving your head in the sand became a conduit of intolerance for people with beliefs that differ from our own. I was shocked how quickly everyone glommed onto a narrative so easily appropriated by special groups with direct conflicts of economic interests, while aggressively shaming anyone who stepped out of line to point that out or ask whether one policy or another was effective, or harmful. I have read about a lot of dumb things humanity has done throughout history, but our reaction to covid is probably the dumbest I'm likely to see in my lifetime. More studies like this to come, rest assured.

>The Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. have released multiple observational studies suggesting that school mask mandates significantly reduce case rates.

>however, incorporating a larger sample and longer period showed no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates.

>Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables. Randomized studies can more reliably inform public health policy.

I think the big story here is that the CDC is promoting bad science, while being treated as the gold standard by "fact checkers".

Perhaps this is a condemnation of how poor indoor air quality is in most schools (and office spaces) more than anything.

While there are plenty of studies showing efficacy of masks in indoor environments, we're barely recirculating air in indoor spaces to the point where CO2 levels become a major problem for cognition.

The combination of proper ventilation and air exchange plus masks should be the real winner for prevention of spread.

We people are stupid and keep repeating the same mistakes! Didn't we make billions of people obese because we put all fats in one bucket? Now, we're repeating the same mistakes with "masks"! A filthy soggy cloth breeding germs and not preventing any infection is a "mask" just like a kids' KF94/KN95 one!!! Even if it's certified mask - if it's not worn by the specs, it does extraordinarily little!

I'm not a scientist or a doctor but it seems that forcing kids to mask for 6 hours a day is useless when they leave school and go to sporting events, movie theaters, restaurants, shopping malls, and even their classmates homes, all without a mask. Does Covid only spread in a classroom?

And protecting the teachers and staff isn't a justified reason either because the vast majority of them are removing the masks when they leave the school also.

It just doesn't seem logical to me.

From the study:

> School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways.

From my purely anecdotal observations, regions with higher rates of COVID are more likely to adopt masking requirements as a countermeasure. That correlation alone would explain why the benefits of masking become unclear when measured on a large scale.

So the masks don’t keep the children more healthy, and it’s entirely possible they hurt language development and classroom engagement.

Sorry, kids.

It looks almost too stupid to believe they really assumed pediatric cases will be different. Vast majority of covid cases among kids are asymptomatic and never detected, masking for kids is not about protecting them, it's about protecting their parents and especially grandparents from the covid infection they could bring from school.

there was even better study published recently about how significant part of "long COVID" patients have various mental issues similar to people you works previously call hypochondriacs

"Increased risk for PASC (long COVID) was noted in women and those with a history of anxiety disorder."

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905