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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We have been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. Our kids have spent a year and a half of their childhoods wearing useless cloth masks over their faces.

Vaccines are available for anyone who wants one.

COVID is here to stay; it’s already mutated into a highly-transmissible (hello, silly cloth masks!) but far less serious virus on par with the flu. It is far less of a threat to children than countless other risks and diseases which we have learned to live.

Anyone who is still concerned now has access to PPE (n95 masks, face shields, latex gloves) and can make use of that. The era of dictating to other people’s children about this stuff is over.

I think what’s really irking people is that compliance with mask and vaccine mandates has become a political thing. Thank God that the Arlington Diocese has done the right thing and trusted parents to make the choice that’s right for their family. [/quote]

WELL SAID. The mask nuts need to move on. It’s over. Get a life. [/quote]

Don’t complain when your kid has to stay home for five days when a classmate tests positive. Also, do not make extra work for teachers. [/quote]

It’s funny you say that, because this already happened to us while the mask requirement was in place. These masks do not stop people from getting COVID; they just don’t.

No peer-reviewed scientific studies—the kinds with control groups etc.—have shown any appreciable benefit to wearing the cloth masks that our kids have been wearing for a year and a half. And any parent knows how unrealistic it is to even expect young kids to even properly wear these masks for a full school day; and then consider all the exceptions (no masks for lunchtime, no masks while enabled in physical exercise, no masks while drinking) which would have to be factored into the analysis as well.

And even if there were some marginal benefit of masking, it must be weighed against the obvious negatives and potential harm that years of masking might inflict on the mental, social, and psychological health of children. Where are the scientific studies to show that masking is safe, or quantifying these other emotional/mental health risks?

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“The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high.”

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118

“A large, randomized trial led by researchers at Stanford Medicine and Yale University has found that wearing a surgical face mask over the mouth and nose is an effective way to reduce the occurrence of COVID-19 in community settings.”

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-masks-covid-19.html

“Optimum use of face masks with additional precautions has been found to be useful controlling the spread of the respiratory viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 in most of the studies and metaanalyses.“

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34284538/

Where are the studies showing masks cause social and emotional damage to children?

Those of you using the “cloth mask is useless” as justification for unmasking simply need to use surgical masks as the acceptable standard.[/quote]

Those studies pre-date Omicron, which is highly adapted for aerosol transmission. Surgical masks aren't going to help with that.

Furthermore, the benefit of surgical masks disappeared in villagers under the age of 50 in that study, and many of the findings in that study failed to meet the usual threshold of statistical significance. The intervention also only lasted 8 weeks. That's a narrow window, especially given the seasonality of the virus and its tendency to come in waves.  And those 8 weeks weren't a "surge" for COVID. The resulting difference in seroprevalance between the surgical mask community and the control community was very small. .76% vs. .68%.

It's not an impressive result, and I don't see anything in there that would suggest that cloth or surgical masks are going to make a real difference among children in a classroom environment.

And even if we were to assume (totally without support) that the study's results in people ages 60 and older were perfectly replicated in a classroom full of children, an 11% reduction in cases is good, but it's only making a difference at a population-level. If I were immunocompromised I would not want to hang my hat on an 11% reduction in that risk. Even if it makes sense at a policy level, for individual decisionmaking I don't think that's an adequate basis to take or not take a risk. [/quote]

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