About That Masking In Boston Schools Study
Yes, there are sampling issues, but they only make the results more compelling
So with the fall of Twitter and what I’m thinking will indeed be a shift from the Blogger platform, I’m going to change things up here and have less of a formal format for weekend posts. Have also changed the newsletter name to Weighty Matters. Tough to let go of that since I’ve been writing under that banner since 2005.
Today I wanted to briefly discuss and link to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine regarding schools and masking Lifting Universal Masking in Schools — Covid-19 Incidence among Students and Staff
Briefly the authors compared COVID rates between schools that kept and schools that dropped mask mandates. In all, data was available from over 300,000 students learning in over 70 schools. Some dropped their mask mandates at different weeks in February 2022, but two districts kept them through June 2022.
Not surprisingly, masks helped to prevent the transmission of COVID.
And here you might wonder if those two districts that kept up their mask mandates - did they differ in other ways? Maybe they were more affluent, or more concerned about COVID overall in some way.
Actually they were different. They were more racialized, were of lower socio-economic status, and had larger class sizes. All things that you would expect would increase risk of contracting COVID.
The authors estimated that the extra 4 months of mandated masks in those two school districts prevented 12,000 additional COVID cases among staff and students, which of course in turn prevented those same cases from spreading further in their homes and communities.
Masking is a barely inconvenient low cost means to markedly decrease the burden of airborne viruses which right now means not just COVID, but RSV and flu. It also helps to mitigate structural racism.
That as a society we’re electing to instead let it rip through schools which this fall is resulting in an unprecedented paediatric health care crisis is obscene.
Those who can do better should. Those who can’t? We’re failing them simply because we’re selfish and/or we want to pretend it’s 2019 again.
Also, it’s that time of year again, this Movember I’m trying to channel my best Simon (Steven Ogg) from the Walking Dead as that seems somehow apropos to the times.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to do Movember this year, and then I watched a video where they discussed their funding of a first responder led program for first responders with PTSD and that got me back in line quickly. I’ve raised just over a third of my goal and would certainly welcome and appreciate your donations which you can give by clicking here.
What I notice on the graphs is that all the lines start at a similar level in January, before any school made a change in mask requirements. I assume all the schools required masks through January, and that they all had similar rates if COVID infections. If so, what is the real value of masks in schools?