Reply to When should DC drop its school mask mandate?

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Reply to "When should DC drop its school mask mandate?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NYC is dropping *outdoor* mask mandates: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/nyc-schools-drop-outdoor-mask-mandate-with-cdc-poised-to-ease-fed-guidelines/3571856/

Hopefully DCPS follow; we need to start somewhere.[/quote]

This would make me happy both because I would love for my kid to be able to run around a playground with her friends without a mask, and because it would be a step towards finally recognizing that w can of course have different rules for different settings based on risk. One reason this debate frustrates me, as others have noted, is that there is an all-or-nothing quality to the debate that doesn't reflect what we know about Covid.

I think there was a time when people believed we needed to have "consistent" rules about masking because kids wouldn't be able to understand or adjust to different rules. But anyone with a kid has learned that actually kids adjust pretty easily, and when in doubt they just keep their mask on, and that works too. I do not think at this point that it would be hard to implement rules that required masks indoors but not outdoors, or that required masks during surges but not the rest of the time. I don't think we'd run into much resistance from kids doing this, and I also think allowing them to go mask-free when it's not really required would help them acclimate to this "new normal" a bit where we have a new public health concern that we need to be responsive to and will be living with for some time. Masks-all-the-time is not really a sustainable approach for long term and contributes to this sense that we are still mid-crisis. We aren't. We continue to deal with a hard thing but we have lots of practice and far more tools than we once did, and we should be able to incorporate it into our daily lives without having to completely shape our lives around the issue.

So yes, letting kids take masks off on the playground (and parents and teachers take masks off during outdoor drop off and pick up) would be a step in that direction that I think would benefit everyone in the long run. The virus really does not spread in outdoor settings other than very tightly packed large events (soccer games, festivals) and I think most kids realize that by now. It about time we started being more honest with them about all this and trusting them to handle it.[/quote]

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