The Science of Masking Kids at School Remains Uncertain

"But the world has changed, there are real downsides to masking children for this long, with no known end date, and without any clear upside." She continued, "I'm not aware of any studies that show conclusively that kids wearing masks in schools has any effect on their own morbidity or mortality or on the hospitalization or death rate in the community around them."

"We lack credible evidence for benefits of masking kids aged 2 to 5, despite what the American Academy of Pediatrics says," Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote recently.

While there are models, and simulations on mannequins with masks, "Mechanistic studies are incapable of anticipating and tallying the effects that emerge when real people are asked to do real things in the real world," Vinay Prasad of UCSF wrote in a critique of the CDC's child masking recommendation.

Those facts alone may account for part of the reason why the Georgia study found no clear benefit for a masking requirement for kids in schools.

Many people may surmise that even if there's not conclusive evidence, it's still likely that masking kids in schools helps.

Fisher stressed his opinions are not to be perceived as contradicting AAP's stance for universal masking of students but said he wanted to discuss some of the potential harms and the importance of using evidence and data to drive decisions on when to eliminate mask usage.

One doctor, who is on TV regularly and has around 100,000 Twitter followers, sent me two studies where masks were required of all students so there was no way to determine the effect; the authors of one of the studies explicitly noted, "​​we were not able to examine the impact of universal masking owing to nearly 100 percent adoption of this intervention," and authors of the other study wrote, "It was not possible to determine the specific roles that mask-wearing played in the low rate of disease spread." In a number of the studies cited by the agency there was universal masking combined with other measures, such as ventilation as noted, there was no way to know whether a mask mandate contributed to mitigating case rates or not.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-masking-kids-at-school-remains-uncertain.html