Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday recommended that my daughter, her classmates, her teachers, and everyone else who sets foot inside her middle school wear masks yet again this coming year.
"[The] CDC recommends localities encourage universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to schools, regardless of vaccination status," the agency announced, reversing its own guidance from 19 days prior in the wake of increased delta variant-fueled infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.
When the CDC in mid-February shocked epidemiologists by keeping its global outlier of a school social-distancing recommendation at an average of 6 feet between humans, multiple school boards in blue polities responded by suspending plans to reopen.
The CDC school masking guidance would have us believe that everyone in this school needs to wear masks because chances are that one vaccinated person will contract the delta variant, and we just don't know whether that person might have the ability to spread it to any unvaccinated stragglers in the building.
As the CDC points out, "To date, no unexpected patterns have been identified in the case demographics or vaccine characteristics among people with reported vaccine breakthrough infections." This finding is of particular importance when it comes to schools because the underlying case demographics of COVID are that even the unvaccinated kids rarely get it, spread it, or suffer from it.
Most of the developed world has not been masking elementary school children, in recognition of both the limited benefits and developmental costs.
As Boston-based infectious disease specialists Westyn Branch-Elliman, Shira Doron, and Elissa Schechter-Perkins put it in the Washington Post last week, "On July 8, the superintendent of schools in Decatur, Ga., announced that masks would be mandatory for all students in schools next year. School districts in California and New York have adopted similar policies. This insistence on universal mask-wearing is not an evidence-based approach."
https://reason.com/2021/07/28/cdc-sentences-kids-to-another-school-year-of-irrational-masking/
No comments:
Post a Comment