The article talks a lot about how there's little or no evidence showing benefits of masking for kids, and also talks a lot about the unknown long-term effects of masking on kids. However, as with so many articles trying to make a point or persuade people, it barely mentions at all the unknown long-term effects of covid.
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.
Thats not what the article is about. The article is showing the lack of evidence for masks at schools. If transmission isn't impacted by masks, then the severity of covid has nothing to do with the decision of whether to require masks or not.
But while it points out that the evidence for masks being effective is scarce, it does little to identify positive evidence that masks are specifically ineffective. So we just don't know as much as CDC's consistent guidelines seem to suggest, and it makes sense to weigh the risk. That the article neglects to frame it in this light highlights the one-sided nature.
There is plenty of evidence that high quality, well fitted masks (N95 or equivalent) work in the sense of reducing the risk of transmission in any single close contact interaction. But so what? The virus is here to stay and can never be eradicated. Obviously people aren't going to spend the rest of their lives wearing masks. In fact outside the HN bubble in many areas people have already stopped. We're all going to be exposed multiple times throughout our lives no matter what. Masks can only slightly delay that at best.
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.
[citation needed] Studies that don't use a model or beg the question? The Danish one that shows 3% effectiveness? Or the Bangladesh one that shows 11%?
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.
I'm not sure how "we're through the looking glass" because there is still debate on the issue, the Atlantic article lays out pretty strong evidence to suggest there is at the very least still plenty of room for debate. Further I don't understand how debating issues is "human-hostile" as you put it. All public measures should continuously be up for debate.
If there is little to no evidence that it reduces spread amongst children, the effects of covid on children is irrelevant. You wouldn't say an article shitting on
Ivermectin effacy failed to take into account Long COVID.
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.
>there's little or no evidence showing benefits of masking for kids,
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.
If you have small children you know what joke masks are in school. Little kids are not responsible adults. They touch their face, take their masks on and off, exchange them with their friends and even eat them.
Pretending that masks on young kids contribute anything to slowing the spread is complete wishful thinking.
Well, if you have elderly parents you will also learn a thing or five about mask-wearing discipline. They will do all of the things above (except maybe eating them). My personal favorite: removing the mask when they have to cough. And even in the in-between age groups, the "responsible adults" are fewer than you might think...
And yet my impression of slightly older children and teens (admittedly in Canada) is that they're better and more consistent at mask wearing than adults are. My son couldn't care less if he's wearing a mask or not -- heck I think he hates wearing socks more.
I wonder how much of these breathless articles against masking children is more about adults than about the children.
I second this. The article mentions how dubious it is that kids can wear their masks properly. I’ll site my own son who routinely pulls his down below his mouth and nose. I can imagine the stress on teachers who have to keep up appearances that masks are being enforced while also watching the kids in their class do anything but keep them on in an effective manner.
Demanding evidence of things we know nothing about in order to consider evidence of things we do know about is a rather tall order, even theoretically speaking.
That's a non sequitur. Forcing children to wear masks in schools won't prevent them from being exposed to SARS-CoV-2. The virus is highly contagious and can never be eradicated, so just because there might be some long-term effects for a minority of patients (as with any viral infection) that's not a valid reason to continue mask mandates.
We obviously can't expect healthy children to wear masks forever. That would be absurd and dystopian. So what are the exit criteria?
The article also seems to contradict itself. It notes that there are negatives to mask wearing in terms of lip reading and clarity of voice, but the people in class that talk the most are the teachers, and they seem to show the most benefit from wearing masks. At least at my child's school, children don't have to wear masks at lunch and recess (which are held outside). This is when children mostly communicate with each other.
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.
While your point is spot on, it probably won‘t matter in the long run. With the infection rate of Omicron, we as a society were faced between even more ridiculously restrictive measures to contain it after the first economy destroying measures — or just taking the jump into the unknown unknown of what will happen if we let everyone get infected and move into the endemic state.
With probably only the exception of China, most countries have decided that they will take the latter path, at various degrees of throttling.
That's assuming we're containing it at all. This all seems very hubristic to me, but I just wanted to point out the assumption. It's not because we do things that burden us to a degree that the virus' spread is also burdened to the same degree. I feel that this is an unconscious assumption that's made in this discussion.
We’re not, people are pretending that we are or still have the opportunity.
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.
You wouldn't expect an article that talks about the long-term effects of COVID to also address the downsides of mask and restrictions, so why should the opposite be true? You can read independent arguments for both sides of the issue, judge their strengths and weaknesses, and then make up your own mind.
> You wouldn't expect an article that talks about the long-term effects of COVID to also address the downsides of mask and restrictions
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.
The built in assumption is that you can stop it. Yup, masking usually slows down infection rates but when you roll those dice every day with a very infectious variant it doesn’t matter. If the hospitals aren’t full what difference have you made if everybody gets it over the course of two months instead of two weeks? (And hospitals aren’t full of children, the peak is past, so we’re definitely solidly entering “what’s the point” territory)
This is actually a thing I had my mind changed almost immediately upon hearing argument for primary and early secondary schools.
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.
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.