Impact of masks in schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s ARKANSAS, so many fewer of them were vaccinated! Cannot compare to here.

They state that vaccination rates at the time of study were 13-18%. So yeah, not high.

Now do a study on the difference masking makes when the population is 60-75% vaccinated like NOVA. Negligible almost certainly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:These studies are pointless. No one should care about cases, long covid is so overblown it’s practically absurd. The issue is severity of disease and so vaccine rates of the community is the big difference maker. We don’t need studies for this as all of Europe has been unmasking their kids (and especially primary age) the entire pandemic. Kids can continue to wear high quality masks if they choose.

This is a good point. When cases are no longer that predictive of severe outcomes, they don't matter much.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s ARKANSAS, so many fewer of them were vaccinated! Cannot compare to here.

Yeah I was floored when I read the bit about the vaccination rate among the districts studied: 13.5 to 18.6 percent of students and staff members

Still that's much more of an apples to apples comparison than comparing districts with different mask policies AND different vaccination rates. I doubt there is a similar study comparing highly vaccinated districts because until the last couple weeks all of those would have been mandating masks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For the MMR piece, I'm trying to find the underlying incidence. They report the community incidence at 745/100,000, declining to 137/100,000.

My point is that if you've got a really low incidence, a 23% decline from a really low incidence could be really not meaningful.

Unfortunately many of the CDC's MMRs have used cherry-picked data simply to back up their failures.

[Anonymous]

Apparently in places with masking, they did contact tracing that said that no one near the maskers could have caught covid. Sooooo.....yeah you're going to find that there's less secondary transmission in places with masks because they didn't look for it.