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The case against masks at school

theatlantic.com

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Re: The case against masks at school

#441

Post by jmull »

aeternum wrote: post #244
docfort wrote: post #96

This argument is poorly constructed. I think there could be better ones, but here’s my problem. It goes through the three CDC studies and correctly observes that they fail to separate regions that have high vaccination rates from schools without a mask mandate. Indeed, the ideal experiment would involve two schools that are otherwise identical in the same geographical area with high vaccination rates: one that has no…

A randomized study was run in Bangladesh. There they handed out masks to randomly selected villages among a pool of 600 villages with similar vaccination and political stances. That study showed that the effect of surgical masks was statistically significant when used by the elderly 50+ population. For other age groups and for cloth masks, the advantage was statistically insignificant. All the headlines around this s…

Teachers are the "50+ population" in schools, right?

I never know what to make of posts like this. It seems almost insulting to have to explicitly point out that masks are about reducing transmission, and that transmission could occur between students (not 50+) and teachers (many 50+).

Right?

So your conclusion should be that the Bangladesh study is quite relevant to schools, yet you seem to be suggesting the opposite?

Though I knew about it, I don't think I really appreciated how people could cherry-pick information to fit their preconceived ideas until covid.

Re: The case against masks at school

#442

Post by dahfizz »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #282
ngngngng wrote: post #275

Funny to watch the Atlantic change directions on COVID over the last few months. I go back and forth on masks. In general I find them to be a minor inconvenience, although I believe they're more inconvenient for me than most because I'm blind and no matter what I do they always fog up my glasses. But while masks themselves are mildly inconvenient, harsh mask mandates and restrictions become much more of an annoyance…

and all the halfway measures we've taken haven't achieved their stated goals. You have some good points up until this one. Go to your local hospital and ask them how they'd like it if their case load went up by 2x due to a lack of "halfway measures." In some places, that will be OK, while in others, it will be utterly catastrophic. Obviously that doesn't justify ridiculous overreactions to unmasked toddlers, as you p…

> Go to your local hospital and ask them how they'd like it if their case load went up by 2x due to a lack of "halfway measures."

I love this argument.

"Just imagine how much worse things could have been! The observed outcome is better than a worst case scenario I made up!"

"Just imagine if I didn't wear my lucky socks to the game. We would have lost even worse!"

The data does not bear out your position. Places with less / no mandates did not have measurably worse outcomes.

Re: The case against masks at school

#443

Post by rmah »

vikingerik wrote: post #407
autoexec wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad you can't know if you're sick or not until it's too late. It's one of the reasons this virus spreads so quickly. Even if you're not sick wearing masks also helps to protect you from getting sick. It's win/win for extremely minimal effort/inconvenience.

Too bad that condemning everyone as sick with zero evidence isn't how a free society works. Let's imprison everyone who "might" commit a crime. Masks have gigantic effort/inconvenience and mental health costs. I can't think of anything but counting down the seconds until ripping that f*cking thing off my face while being strangled by that shit. Yet nobody cares about anyone else's mental health over their own perceiv…

Lol, if you think "Masks have gigantic effort/inconvenience and mental health costs", your life must be a continuous living hellscape.

Re: The case against masks at school

#444

Post by davidw »

spookthesunset wrote: post #438
davidw wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again: people are dying, right now, because they can't get access to health care, because hospitals in some places are overflowing with mostly unvaccinated people with COVID. This seems like a fairly location-specific issue, so I would expect that different places could do different things at different times. We can and are focusing on other things, but hospital capacity is a good one to work on keeping down. On…

Where are people dying because they cannot get access to healthcare?

https://healthandwelfare.idaho.gov/news/idaho-activates-cris... - comes to mind. Here where I live in Oregon, during the Delta surge, people were waiting on "elective" surgeries for things like cancer treatment, and the hospital system was pretty clear that some ended up dying because the hospital was overloaded.

Re: The case against masks at school

#445

Post by autoexec »

elzbardico wrote: post #402
autoexec wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. Putting literally anything in front of your virus spewing face hole is going to help to some degree. It's not as if the crook of our arms are rated to filter viruses, but that hasn't stopped health organizations all over the world from recommending the vampire cough for years. It's true that a mask alone isn't enough to guarantee anyone's safety and while community spread is high sending kids into…

humm... no. Things don't work like that. On the contrary, exhaling through what is essentially is a sieve is only going to promote aerosolization.

Exhaling through a sieve still blocks the largest wettest particles, and limits the distance virus is forcefully expelled through the air. Again, it's not perfect, but infection is purely a numbers game. The more virus you can deposit on a mask, or a sleeve, or even a sieve, the less virus is in the air and the longer it takes for a virus to go from a mouth on one side of a room to a receptor on the other side of a room the better.

Re: The case against masks at school

#446

Post by michaelmrose »

ngngngng wrote: post #325
phailhaus wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try taking a 6 hour flight with a 2 year old that's required to keep his mask on the entire flight, and when he takes it off (because he's 2, of course he's going to take it off) the flight attendants threaten to turn the plane around and ban you permanently. Never heard about this, source? Toddlers tend to be somewhat exempt from mask mandates because they're toddlers and everyone understands when they don't compl…

https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/08/20/tsa-exten... The TSA mandate itself. Only those under age 2 are exempt from it. This is just for the US obviously, not sure about other places. But in my experience the less you paid for your ticket the more strict the airline is. I typically don't fly budget airlines but did once during the pandemic and that's when a flight attendant shouted at me and my wife when o…

They would probably be more patient and tolerant of children if they hadn't spent 2 years dealing with manchidren who scream at flight attendants and punch them in the face. I've actually never seen anyone on an airplane shout at all. Did they actually scream at you or merely speak tersely?

Re: The case against masks at school

#447

Post by cardanome »

criddell wrote: post #114
throwaway22032 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the fundamental issue with coronavirus mitigation measures. There are circumstances in which "drop everything" makes sense - if coronavirus were ten times more fatal, we'd do it naturally. But in general, looking at life from a perspective of "what is the minimum possible quality of life we can have" is depressing and fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit. I tend to think that people who operate in…

I have a feeling that if the same people were tasked with setting road speed limits, they would set it to 20 mph and argue that 30,000 lives will be saved each year. They aren't wrong, but it's misjudging the risk most of us are willing to accept for the benefits of being able to move around quickly.

You are grossly misrepresenting the argument. It is about 30mph inside cities. Which is a great idea, not just for saving lives but for substantially increasing quality of life of everyone living there.

The greatest cause of noise in cities is traffic. Setting a strict speed limit would substantially reduce this. (Also side benefits like better air quality and so on) And traffic would actually flow better, so you might not even reach your destination that much later.

You can be protect your individual freedom at all cost and treat everything as a zero sum game or you can bee cooperative and help build a better world for everyone by compromising a bit.

Re: The case against masks at school

#448

Post by autoexec »

adolph wrote: post #386
autoexec wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. Putting literally anything in front of your virus spewing face hole is going to help to some degree. It's not as if the crook of our arms are rated to filter viruses, but that hasn't stopped health organizations all over the world from recommending the vampire cough for years. It's true that a mask alone isn't enough to guarantee anyone's safety and while community spread is high sending kids into…

> not as if the crook of our arms are rated to filter viruses People don't shake elbows (unless they have a really intimate elbow bump).

Masks also keep our hands cleaner and we don't usually lick each other's masks either. Masks aren't perfect, but they work.

Re: The case against masks at school

#449

Post by rightbyte »

criddell wrote: post #15

My kids attend a university in Canada and live in residence on campus. They have had incredibly strict rules around masking and gatherings. It's clear that they are only considering one variable - number of infections - and it seems like they aren't considering any other factors. For example, in the dorm there is a common area with a piano. Because of COVID, playing that piano is banned. Even if there was a reasonabl…

The piano thing feels like a "we gotta do something" from a board with very little power over things that would limit transmission. Maybe they have a separate dorm board.

It is like where I live, the library closed becouse that was the only thing the county could close.

And there is like never more than 10 people there at the same time for a huge building. They could just have closed the cafeteria and remove the reading chairs. Etc.

Re: The case against masks at school

#450

Post by orangecat »

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #389
taylodl wrote: post #304

General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors. And i…

Isn't the whole point of the article that school mask mandates probably don't reduce spread? If it doesn't reduce spread than it won't help your overwhelmed friends working in medicine. Sorry I guess I just don't understand what point you are trying to make.

So many Covid (and other) policies are the result of "We must do something. This is something."
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