Masks optional by spring break

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:People who act like masks 40 hours a week on little kids for YEARS during their prime learning, socialization, and development years have zero credibility. We should be balancing harms. How well do they work? What is the harm they really reduce? What harm do they cause? It’s time they came off. It really is. The kids have been really great but they’ve paid a high price. Not worth it anymore. Experts slowly coming around.

What harm do masks do??

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MoCo indoor mask mandate is to expire on 2/21 and will not be renewed. For those who believe that the decision re masking should be in the hands of the local health department, here’s your answer. They say no more masks.

They haven't said that about schools.

MSDE is going to meet on Feb 22, they are slated to rescind the 180 days of masking policy. MCPS can off ramp now if it wanted to. BOE is going to discuss it at the next meeting. Archdiocese of Washington just made masks optional for students, so once MoCo mask mandate expires, those kids are going to unmask.

The Archdiocese of Washington schools aren't comparable to an MCPS school in terms of size.

We don't know if those kids will unmask. It depends how much common sense those kids and parents have.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:No more testing, no cases. We just got out of a huge surge right after the last mask lifting.

I'm not really sure what you mean. You don't actually think the surge was due to people not wear some Old Navy fabric across their nose and mouth, right?

The surge was a new variant thanks to those traveling who relied on the vaccine as a cure and it wasn’t. The surge was due to selfish people not staying home and stressing it. It will happen again.

Why do you keep letting the unvaccinated off the hook? But I am glad you are recognizing that it had nothing to do with mask wearing -- so let's drop them, eh?

Vaccines help with symptoms but are not stopping the spread of new variants. MOCO is highly vaccinated and just had a huge surge so clearly these vaccines alone are not enough to stop surges. When students get Covid they miss out on school. The idea of masking and precautions is to stop the spread to keep students in school, which should be everyone,’s goal. It’s sad we live in a me culture and not a we culture. Everyone hates masks but we mask to keep ourselves safe and to keep others safe. It’s part of living in a community.

Look at the data in cities and countries that split out cases by vaccination status. Vaccination still reduces spread. Stop spreading misinformation because you want everyone to stay home in 2022. Our goal is not zero cases. Stop it. Enough.

You may be ok getting Covid but others of us are not ok getting it from you. We just had a huge surge and many of those students and staff were vaccinated. Enough is enough with people like you spreading it and not caring about anyone but yourself. If masking is so hard, stay home.

Can you please say what will be enough for you? Does it have to be the literal eradication of COVID from the world? I would be happy to have a discussion with anyone about when the appropriate time for this is (I did not think it was in January during the surge, but would be ok now) but when people just dig in and say they want to be “safe” and “not get COVID” you just sound resigned to wearing a mask for the rest of your life because life is not 100 percent safe and COVID is not going away. Which is fine if you want to but I do not want that for myself or my children.

It doesn't matter what response I give you, you will always rationalize why your beliefs are more important. No one likes wearing masks. Masking is something simple we can do to help keep our community safe. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Its not just about you. Part of your responsibility as a parent is to teach your children who to live in a densely populated community and show empathy and concern to others. One day it may be your or your child who needs empathy and support.

Our schools are very large, there is no social distancing and it just takes one selfish parent to send their child to school sick or an asymptomatic situation to cause a school outbreak which impacts many families, not just yours.

I am a scientist and I deal with facts and numbers. I also think policies should be set based on facts and measurables not your individual feelings about safety. I feel frustrated with people who continually post the same things about anyone who disagrees with them being bad and theoretical feelings about safety and empathy. I that is not a productive conversation, it’s moral posturing.

We don't have facts or numbers. MCPS, the State of Maryland, MoCo and the Fed's haven't been transparent. And, now they are giving out home tests so people aren't reporting positives so we have even less facts and numbers than before. Plus, the home test aren't always accurate. Its hard to have a productive conversation with all the cover ups and lack of information by the government. The fact is we know MoCo is highly vaccinated and we still had a terrible surge in our schools a month ago. Thankfully it was short lived but it ramped up quickly and can happen again.

This is a serious question, what cover ups do you think have happened? Some one is suppressing case counts? That’s a new one for me.

Obviously case rate data is imperfect since many people are asymptomatic and/or test at home. There are multiple models to account for these known sources of error, some of which are better than others in terms of thoroughness. But in height think trends hold up fairly well. As do hospitalization rates and measures of hospital capacity, both of which I would argue are far more important than a perfect case count. I’d be happy with a metric based on hospitalization rates or hospital capacity for that matter. But the idea we can’t even talk about getting masks off our kids with our name calling (despite under 6s never masking in most of the world and under 12s never masking in many countries with very little differences in outcomes) is …well it’s not encouraging.

We are not talking hospitalizations we are talking transmission. I don’t care about hospitalizations, I care transmissions and positives. I care your family doesn’t care and will give it to my family.

Do you not get that it can be a big deal for other families and their lives don’t just revolve around your wants and entitlement.

My family does care and we are all fully vaccinated and have cheerfully worn our masks for nearly two years now to protect those at risk before they were protected by vaccination. But we can still ask reasonable questions about the purpose and duration of these restrictions. I am concerned that people who are vaguely concerned with the concept of transmission, unlinked to the actual severity of disease, who are unwilling to discuss any metrics that could be acceptable because of “cover ups” are essentially expecting our children to wear masks for another two years or more. That it will never be the right time and the cases will never be low “enough” and they can just insult people for suggesting otherwise.

My concern is that a the PP has such a level of anxiety that they will never get to a point where they feel comfortable without masks under any circumstances

Being concerned about Covid I’d not anxiety but you should get your mental health checked. We are not at the level to unmask yet.

Why are these crazies saying it's not time, but fail to indicate when will be the right time? It's because it will NEVER be the right time.

The right time is when we stop having huge surges and the numbers are low and stay low. We haven't had that yet. You are the crazy if you are unwilling to take even the most basic precautions to keep our community healthy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People who act like masks 40 hours a week on little kids for YEARS during their prime learning, socialization, and development years have zero credibility. We should be balancing harms. How well do they work? What is the harm they really reduce? What harm do they cause? It’s time they came off. It really is. The kids have been really great but they’ve paid a high price. Not worth it anymore. Experts slowly coming around.

What harm do masks do??

They sew division on various social media and message boards all across 'murica!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MoCo indoor mask mandate is to expire on 2/21 and will not be renewed. For those who believe that the decision re masking should be in the hands of the local health department, here’s your answer. They say no more masks.

They haven't said that about schools.

MSDE is going to meet on Feb 22, they are slated to rescind the 180 days of masking policy. MCPS can off ramp now if it wanted to. BOE is going to discuss it at the next meeting. Archdiocese of Washington just made masks optional for students, so once MoCo mask mandate expires, those kids are going to unmask.

The Archdiocese of Washington schools aren't comparable to an MCPS school in terms of size.

We don't know if those kids will unmask. It depends how much common sense those kids and parents have.

More backdoor private school recruiting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Frederick county just said no more masks. It’s coming, anxious people, prepare.

Did they? You have a link?

I saw that they announced they would have a vote next week on 2/23. But even that isn't a sure thing; their board is pretty split on the issue

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:No more testing, no cases. We just got out of a huge surge right after the last mask lifting.

I'm not really sure what you mean. You don't actually think the surge was due to people not wear some Old Navy fabric across their nose and mouth, right?

The surge was a new variant thanks to those traveling who relied on the vaccine as a cure and it wasn’t. The surge was due to selfish people not staying home and stressing it. It will happen again.

Why do you keep letting the unvaccinated off the hook? But I am glad you are recognizing that it had nothing to do with mask wearing -- so let's drop them, eh?

Vaccines help with symptoms but are not stopping the spread of new variants. MOCO is highly vaccinated and just had a huge surge so clearly these vaccines alone are not enough to stop surges. When students get Covid they miss out on school. The idea of masking and precautions is to stop the spread to keep students in school, which should be everyone,’s goal. It’s sad we live in a me culture and not a we culture. Everyone hates masks but we mask to keep ourselves safe and to keep others safe. It’s part of living in a community.

Look at the data in cities and countries that split out cases by vaccination status. Vaccination still reduces spread. Stop spreading misinformation because you want everyone to stay home in 2022. Our goal is not zero cases. Stop it. Enough.

You may be ok getting Covid but others of us are not ok getting it from you. We just had a huge surge and many of those students and staff were vaccinated. Enough is enough with people like you spreading it and not caring about anyone but yourself. If masking is so hard, stay home.

Can you please say what will be enough for you? Does it have to be the literal eradication of COVID from the world? I would be happy to have a discussion with anyone about when the appropriate time for this is (I did not think it was in January during the surge, but would be ok now) but when people just dig in and say they want to be “safe” and “not get COVID” you just sound resigned to wearing a mask for the rest of your life because life is not 100 percent safe and COVID is not going away. Which is fine if you want to but I do not want that for myself or my children.

It doesn't matter what response I give you, you will always rationalize why your beliefs are more important. No one likes wearing masks. Masking is something simple we can do to help keep our community safe. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Its not just about you. Part of your responsibility as a parent is to teach your children who to live in a densely populated community and show empathy and concern to others. One day it may be your or your child who needs empathy and support.

Our schools are very large, there is no social distancing and it just takes one selfish parent to send their child to school sick or an asymptomatic situation to cause a school outbreak which impacts many families, not just yours.

I am a scientist and I deal with facts and numbers. I also think policies should be set based on facts and measurables not your individual feelings about safety. I feel frustrated with people who continually post the same things about anyone who disagrees with them being bad and theoretical feelings about safety and empathy. I that is not a productive conversation, it’s moral posturing.

We don't have facts or numbers. MCPS, the State of Maryland, MoCo and the Fed's haven't been transparent. And, now they are giving out home tests so people aren't reporting positives so we have even less facts and numbers than before. Plus, the home test aren't always accurate. Its hard to have a productive conversation with all the cover ups and lack of information by the government. The fact is we know MoCo is highly vaccinated and we still had a terrible surge in our schools a month ago. Thankfully it was short lived but it ramped up quickly and can happen again.

This is a serious question, what cover ups do you think have happened? Some one is suppressing case counts? That’s a new one for me.

Obviously case rate data is imperfect since many people are asymptomatic and/or test at home. There are multiple models to account for these known sources of error, some of which are better than others in terms of thoroughness. But in height think trends hold up fairly well. As do hospitalization rates and measures of hospital capacity, both of which I would argue are far more important than a perfect case count. I’d be happy with a metric based on hospitalization rates or hospital capacity for that matter. But the idea we can’t even talk about getting masks off our kids with our name calling (despite under 6s never masking in most of the world and under 12s never masking in many countries with very little differences in outcomes) is …well it’s not encouraging.

We are not talking hospitalizations we are talking transmission. I don’t care about hospitalizations, I care transmissions and positives. I care your family doesn’t care and will give it to my family.

Do you not get that it can be a big deal for other families and their lives don’t just revolve around your wants and entitlement.

My family does care and we are all fully vaccinated and have cheerfully worn our masks for nearly two years now to protect those at risk before they were protected by vaccination. But we can still ask reasonable questions about the purpose and duration of these restrictions. I am concerned that people who are vaguely concerned with the concept of transmission, unlinked to the actual severity of disease, who are unwilling to discuss any metrics that could be acceptable because of “cover ups” are essentially expecting our children to wear masks for another two years or more. That it will never be the right time and the cases will never be low “enough” and they can just insult people for suggesting otherwise.

My concern is that a the PP has such a level of anxiety that they will never get to a point where they feel comfortable without masks under any circumstances

Being concerned about Covid I’d not anxiety but you should get your mental health checked. We are not at the level to unmask yet.

Why are these crazies saying it's not time, but fail to indicate when will be the right time? It's because it will NEVER be the right time.

The right time is when we stop having huge surges and the numbers are low and stay low. We haven't had that yet. You are the crazy if you are unwilling to take even the most basic precautions to keep our community healthy.

MoCo is highly vaccinated. You folks keep changing the definitions of "basic precautions."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

One way masking clearly doesn't work or we wouldn't have all the positives. KN95 are not all reliable so pushing them makes no sense. You want another surge? You want someone to get really sick? What is wrong with you that you cannot handle basic precautions?

We had all of those positives with two way masking. By your logic, two way masking doesn’t work either.

NP here. You realize that the positives largely came from unmasked people. Initially. it was sports teams. But, also, kids hanging out too long maskless while eating, kids with poor mask wearing, kids who thought they were in a bubble, kids with cloth masks less effective against omicron. Then, they took it home to siblings and friends etc etc.

So, masking does help. A lot. That said, I hope things decrease enough that our vaxxed/boosted kids can interact without masks by Spring.

What are you, a contact tracer? The school epidemiologist? How do you know the transmission pattern in these cases?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

One way masking clearly doesn't work or we wouldn't have all the positives. KN95 are not all reliable so pushing them makes no sense. You want another surge? You want someone to get really sick? What is wrong with you that you cannot handle basic precautions?

We had all of those positives with two way masking. By your logic, two way masking doesn’t work either.

NP here. You realize that the positives largely came from unmasked people. Initially. it was sports teams. But, also, kids hanging out too long maskless while eating, kids with poor mask wearing, kids who thought they were in a bubble, kids with cloth masks less effective against omicron. Then, they took it home to siblings and friends etc etc.

So, masking does help. A lot. That said, I hope things decrease enough that our vaxxed/boosted kids can interact without masks by Spring.

What are you, a contact tracer? The school epidemiologist? How do you know the transmission pattern in these cases?

What kind of clown are you that you can't figure out that a mask reduces the amount of viral load inhaled?

Oh wait - I forgot that you're a Bannon troll looking to desensitize people to caring for children! My bad.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No more testing, no cases. We just got out of a huge surge right after the last mask lifting.

I'm not really sure what you mean. You don't actually think the surge was due to people not wear some Old Navy fabric across their nose and mouth, right?

The surge was a new variant thanks to those traveling who relied on the vaccine as a cure and it wasn’t. The surge was due to selfish people not staying home and stressing it. It will happen again.

Why do you keep letting the unvaccinated off the hook? But I am glad you are recognizing that it had nothing to do with mask wearing -- so let's drop them, eh?

Vaccines help with symptoms but are not stopping the spread of new variants. MOCO is highly vaccinated and just had a huge surge so clearly these vaccines alone are not enough to stop surges. When students get Covid they miss out on school. The idea of masking and precautions is to stop the spread to keep students in school, which should be everyone,’s goal. It’s sad we live in a me culture and not a we culture. Everyone hates masks but we mask to keep ourselves safe and to keep others safe. It’s part of living in a community.

Look at the data in cities and countries that split out cases by vaccination status. Vaccination still reduces spread. Stop spreading misinformation because you want everyone to stay home in 2022. Our goal is not zero cases. Stop it. Enough.

You may be ok getting Covid but others of us are not ok getting it from you. We just had a huge surge and many of those students and staff were vaccinated. Enough is enough with people like you spreading it and not caring about anyone but yourself. If masking is so hard, stay home.

Can you please say what will be enough for you? Does it have to be the literal eradication of COVID from the world? I would be happy to have a discussion with anyone about when the appropriate time for this is (I did not think it was in January during the surge, but would be ok now) but when people just dig in and say they want to be “safe” and “not get COVID” you just sound resigned to wearing a mask for the rest of your life because life is not 100 percent safe and COVID is not going away. Which is fine if you want to but I do not want that for myself or my children.

It doesn't matter what response I give you, you will always rationalize why your beliefs are more important. No one likes wearing masks. Masking is something simple we can do to help keep our community safe. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Its not just about you. Part of your responsibility as a parent is to teach your children who to live in a densely populated community and show empathy and concern to others. One day it may be your or your child who needs empathy and support.

Our schools are very large, there is no social distancing and it just takes one selfish parent to send their child to school sick or an asymptomatic situation to cause a school outbreak which impacts many families, not just yours.

I am a scientist and I deal with facts and numbers. I also think policies should be set based on facts and measurables not your individual feelings about safety. I feel frustrated with people who continually post the same things about anyone who disagrees with them being bad and theoretical feelings about safety and empathy. I that is not a productive conversation, it’s moral posturing.

We don't have facts or numbers. MCPS, the State of Maryland, MoCo and the Fed's haven't been transparent. And, now they are giving out home tests so people aren't reporting positives so we have even less facts and numbers than before. Plus, the home test aren't always accurate. Its hard to have a productive conversation with all the cover ups and lack of information by the government. The fact is we know MoCo is highly vaccinated and we still had a terrible surge in our schools a month ago. Thankfully it was short lived but it ramped up quickly and can happen again.

This is a serious question, what cover ups do you think have happened? Some one is suppressing case counts? That’s a new one for me.

Obviously case rate data is imperfect since many people are asymptomatic and/or test at home. There are multiple models to account for these known sources of error, some of which are better than others in terms of thoroughness. But in height think trends hold up fairly well. As do hospitalization rates and measures of hospital capacity, both of which I would argue are far more important than a perfect case count. I’d be happy with a metric based on hospitalization rates or hospital capacity for that matter. But the idea we can’t even talk about getting masks off our kids with our name calling (despite under 6s never masking in most of the world and under 12s never masking in many countries with very little differences in outcomes) is …well it’s not encouraging.

We are not talking hospitalizations we are talking transmission. I don’t care about hospitalizations, I care transmissions and positives. I care your family doesn’t care and will give it to my family.

Do you not get that it can be a big deal for other families and their lives don’t just revolve around your wants and entitlement.

My family does care and we are all fully vaccinated and have cheerfully worn our masks for nearly two years now to protect those at risk before they were protected by vaccination. But we can still ask reasonable questions about the purpose and duration of these restrictions. I am concerned that people who are vaguely concerned with the concept of transmission, unlinked to the actual severity of disease, who are unwilling to discuss any metrics that could be acceptable because of “cover ups” are essentially expecting our children to wear masks for another two years or more. That it will never be the right time and the cases will never be low “enough” and they can just insult people for suggesting otherwise.

My concern is that a the PP has such a level of anxiety that they will never get to a point where they feel comfortable without masks under any circumstances

Being concerned about Covid I’d not anxiety but you should get your mental health checked. We are not at the level to unmask yet.

Why are these crazies saying it's not time, but fail to indicate when will be the right time? It's because it will NEVER be the right time.

The right time is when we stop having huge surges and the numbers are low and stay low. We haven't had that yet. You are the crazy if you are unwilling to take even the most basic precautions to keep our community healthy.

Not only are numbers low (approaching moderate transmission very quickly) they are decreasing consistently and at a very fast rate. This is why the county has agreed to drop the mask mandate (too late in my opinion). They are going to give guidance to MCPS on reducing mitigation (including masking). It is happening.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People who act like masks 40 hours a week on little kids for YEARS during their prime learning, socialization, and development years have zero credibility. We should be balancing harms. How well do they work? What is the harm they really reduce? What harm do they cause? It’s time they came off. It really is. The kids have been really great but they’ve paid a high price. Not worth it anymore. Experts slowly coming around.

What harm do masks do??

The radical right hates masks or anything that is for the greater good or that benefits everyone. It's too pedestrian. They like things that benefit just the 1%.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Frederick county just said no more masks. It’s coming, anxious people, prepare.

AACPS board voted this evening to go mask optional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People who act like masks 40 hours a week on little kids for YEARS during their prime learning, socialization, and development years have zero credibility. We should be balancing harms. How well do they work? What is the harm they really reduce? What harm do they cause? It’s time they came off. It really is. The kids have been really great but they’ve paid a high price. Not worth it anymore. Experts slowly coming around.

What harm do masks do??

The radical right hates masks or anything that is for the greater good or that benefits everyone. It's too pedestrian. They like things that benefit just the 1%.

Masks not longer benefit others unless they are KN95 or N95. People who don't want masks are wearing cloth or some other thing that does nothing. Those who want to mask are wearing the heavy duty N95, KN95 or double masking. The good news is the ones wearing the heavy duty masks will continue to do so after the mandate is dropped. So the mandate going away will not make it any more unsafe. Fixed it for you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Not only are numbers low (approaching moderate transmission very quickly) they are decreasing consistently and at a very fast rate. This is why the county has agreed to drop the mask mandate (too late in my opinion). They are going to give guidance to MCPS on reducing mitigation (including masking). It is happening.

Then you are a fool.

"In warning to U.S., COVID rates soar after Denmark lifts all restrictions"

"At the beginning of February, Denmark became the first major country to lift the last of its COVID-19 restrictions and effectively declare its part in the pandemic over."

"Since then, however, Denmark has continued to record more COVID-19 cases per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world, and both COVID hospitalizations and deaths have shot up by about a third."

“Not looking good in Denmark,” Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Translational Institute, tweeted Sunday, sharing several charts that terminated in near-vertical upward lines. “Deaths are now 67% of peak, with a steep ascent.”

"Topol’s argument was clear: By ending mitigation measures prematurely, Denmark has brought a resurgence of infection, hospitalization and death upon itself — and anyone who follows in the country’s footsteps risks doing the same."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/in-warning-to-us-covid-rates-soar-after-denmark-lifts-all-restrictions-183342093.html

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Not only are numbers low (approaching moderate transmission very quickly) they are decreasing consistently and at a very fast rate. This is why the county has agreed to drop the mask mandate (too late in my opinion). They are going to give guidance to MCPS on reducing mitigation (including masking). It is happening.

Then you are a fool.

"In warning to U.S., COVID rates soar after Denmark lifts all restrictions"

"At the beginning of February, Denmark became the first major country to lift the last of its COVID-19 restrictions and effectively declare its part in the pandemic over."

"Since then, however, Denmark has continued to record more COVID-19 cases per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world, and both COVID hospitalizations and deaths have shot up by about a third."

“Not looking good in Denmark,” Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Translational Institute, tweeted Sunday, sharing several charts that terminated in near-vertical upward lines. “Deaths are now 67% of peak, with a steep ascent.”

"Topol’s argument was clear: By ending mitigation measures prematurely, Denmark has brought a resurgence of infection, hospitalization and death upon itself — and anyone who follows in the country’s footsteps risks doing the same."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/in-warning-to-us-covid-rates-soar-after-denmark-lifts-all-restrictions-183342093.html

BFD. The US has had virtually no restrictions for a long while.