Reply to Charters: When is yours dropping the outdoor mask mandate?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Charters are banding together to form their own science that appeases their COVID fear mongering community and continuing indoor masking. [/quote]

LA just announced masks not required indoors. It will be funny when a handful of charter in DC are the only schools worldwide still insisting on this.[/quote]

And by worldwide, it really will be worldwide. I can't wait for our charter to be one of only, say, 12 schools worldwide still participating in an indoor school mask mandate. What a privileged and elite group!  :roll: [/quote]

Germany is still masking elementary school kids, but they also have more than ten times the case rate as DC right now. Clearly, their medical-grade mask mandate (no cloth masks since late 2020) and all their other crazy restrictions didn't prevent this surge. [/quote]

Even during this surge, Germany does not require children under the age of 6 to mask. At all, even if unvaccinated, even on public transportation or at school.

Are there Asian countries that require children under 6 to mask at school? I really think the US generally, and DC specifically, is unique in masking preschool and kindergarten age children. It is so weird.[/quote]

Ummm. Japan; Korea; Hong Kong...[/quote]

Are 5 and unders required to mask in these countries? I honestly don’t know. Obviously older kids do and masking is more normalized in these countries due to years of masking against other viruses. But that’s not the same as masking 3 and 4 year olds, as we do here.

I wish someone would do a global study on masking kids at school. It shouldn’t even be that hard to collect data. It would be so helpful to have real comparative data on the issue.[/quote]

It would be even more helpful to just have a randomized controlled trial to find out if masks in schools make a meaningful difference or not. It would be entirely feasible, but they are not doing that because they know they wouldn't get the results they want.[/quote]

They did one in Spain - google it - found no difference in group that used masks vs. group that didn't.[/quote]

I am aware of that study, but it is not an RCT. It is a good study though, and a large one, with a much more useful control group than all the hopelessly confounded observational studies they did in the US. What they found is that the older age group (6+) who wore masks actually had more in-school spread than the younger kids who were unmasked. As always with Covid, age is the most important factor.[/quote]

I'd love to see people come together to agree that, at a minimum, ECE kids shouldn't be masked unless they have a risk factor. I don't even mean "they can mask if they want", but an actual recommendation that if a child under 6 is otherwise healthy, it would be better for them not to mask in order to support language acquisition and social skill development. I think kids in this group are getting screwed out of important developmental experiences because of this temporary insanity.

But the problem is that even with that Spanish study, people will come back to you and say "but these kids need to stay masked to protect vulnerable adults." And then if you point out that vulnerable adults can protect themselves by vaccinating, they get very squirrely.

We really are going to keep masking little kids to protect unvaccinated adults. We're really going to do it.[/quote]

So let me get this straight…this theoretical “it may harm social/language development” take is supposed to trump the actual documented findings of the known risk to children who contract covid? How in the heck does that work?

I partially blame the CDC for kowtowing to this adamant group of privileged, white liberals pushing to drop masks. It’s moronic to drop masks in schools because someone changed the way they color the map. The case counts in DC are beginning to tick back up again; ~90/100k is not a low case count, pediatric vaccine rates are not great, and vaccines are less effective against these variants.

Workplaces can do what they want, but schools are supposed to have more equitable, safe access because education is a protected right. School is not some optional thing you can choose to skip or shop around for.

Unmasking students puts vulnerable kids at risk. Yes, wearing one mask helps, but it alone is not enough — when everyone masks, it increases safety substantially, reducing the viral load a child may be exposed to if a classmate is positive and reducing particle concentration in the classroom. If our charter goes mask optional, my high-risk child has to go back to virtual — which is not in any way shape or form a FAPE quality alternative.

We ban peanuts in school to protect a small minority of students. Parents of high-risk children are begging schools to keep mask policies in place so their children can continue to access an education, and we as a society can’t be bothered. [/quote]

LOL at this entire post if it weren't so sad.[/quote]

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