Scott Gottlieb is Dead Wrong

We Do Not Need Mass Testing or Masks for Schools to Be Safe.

In his latest of many routine stops on Face the Nation, Scott Gottlieb laid out a path for schools to remain as safe as possible from Covid for the 2021 school year. He calls for massive surveillance testing for Covid, with forced quantities for all positive tests, universal masking, and even setting up classrooms into pods. This is madness!

Face The Nation @FaceTheNation

.@ScottGottliebMD on avoiding school district quarantines: “Use testing more aggressively to try to identify infections to make sure you're not having an outbreak in that setting, & also make sure you're taking mitigation steps...with masks, proper ventilation.”

Before I explain why, allow me to take you back to a simpler time:

The year is 2018, kids have returned to school from their holiday break and throughout California the schools are teeming with Influenza. In fact in the 2nd week of January pediatric Flu hospital admissions hit a new record of 2.8/100,000.

2017/2018 was a harsh, but not extraordinary year for Pediaric Flu, and nothing compared to the 2009 Swine Flu.

Across the nation Pediatric Flu Deaths hit a new high of 15 untimely deaths.

Again, 2017/2018 was not atypical for Pediatric Flu Deaths and was greater than all Pediatric Covid Deaths over all 18 months of the pandemic.

It was with this news that Governor Jerry Brown took the bold step of closing all schools in California until the "situation" could be brought under control.

Except that didn't happen, right? That would have been insane! Closing schools due to a harsh flu season? That would be unthinkable! So why are we even contemplating it now?

Even with all the worry over "Delta", kids are still at no higher risk from Covid than they would be from the Flu. At no point during the entire Covid-19 pandemic have pediatric hospital admissions related to Covid exceeded those rates seen during the 2017/2018 flu season. Neither in California or nationally.

One confound is that we test for Covid way more than we ever tested for Flu, meaning these numbers are likely biased higher compared to the FluNet numbers from 2018, and yet they still don’t match them.

So why are all these precautions needed? Clearly they aren't for the kids? Last year the argument was kids could catch Covid and spread it to Grandma, but Grandma can get a vaccine now, and even if they aren't as effective as we once hoped, it still lowers the risks for the elderly to something on the same order as the Flu, which means it's no longer an legitimate excuse to makes children suffer.

And they will suffer under Gottlieb's policies.  As Dr. Jay Bhattacharya explains in a recent op ed, mass testing is "lockdown by stealth". It will needlessly confine otherwise healthy children to weeks away from school with no foreseeable benefit to the school or to the community at large.

Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya

My new op-ed: Mass testing is lockdown by stealth...Often PCR may be positive for the healthy who pose no risk of viral spread... The result—a vast number of healthy adults and children forced to miss out on life, with no infection control benefit.

express.co.ukCOMMENT: The war on Covid should be over - We do not need lockdownsDuring the Vietnam war, generals counted enemy casualties as a marker of progress. Every enemy body bag was a step towards victory, up until the war was lost. It was a poor surrogate marker that moved policy in a disastrously wrong direction.

This is because:

"Careful reviews of the published data show that a significant fraction of the time, though a PCR test for viral fragments (the type typically used for testing) may be positive, a healthy person is not infectious and poses no risk of spreading the virus."

Furthermore testing is not free and if conducted at the levels Gottlieb suggests it would add a significant yet superfluous strain on school budgets.

As for masks, if the last 18 month haven't proven that they don't work, I'm not sure what will... But for good measure as recent study out of Canada, highlighted in the daily mail, measured and analyzed the aerosols produced while wearing different styles of masks.

Daily Mail Online @MailOnline

Blue surgical face masks are only 10% effective in preventing COVID infection

trib.alPopular blue face masks do NOT stop COVID-19 spreadA new study from the University of Waterloo claims masks are only 10% effective in preventing coronavirus infections.

It showed that the typical cloth masks and blue surgical masks are effectively useless, preventing only roughly 10% of aerosol emissions compared to wearing no mask at all. The only hope for masking then was with a fit-tested N95 respirator which would block about 40 to 60% of aerosols, but even just a 1/8 inch gap between your face and the respirator would also drop this effectiveness to essentially zero. Say it with me folks, masks don't work!

Fit-tested respirators for children aren't a thing. And even if they were, there's no way they could be worn properly for 7 to 8 hours straight by an elementary school child. Masking in schools has always been a farce. We have over a year of data showing that kids don't need masks in school and most of Europe has woken up to this reality and no longer mandates them if they ever did in the first place. It's good to see that "The Science" is "suddenly" accepting this and the US needs to catch up.

So the reality then is it's time to drop the Covid histrionics. We do not need massive testing, healthy quarantines, or universal masking for kids to be safe in school. When Scott Gottlieb says that, "schools aren't inherently safe", he's just dead wrong!

Kids will be safer in schools this year than they have been during past flu seasons. If that was good enough for us then, it ought to be good enough for us now. We should run this school year like we used to: If you are sick, stay home, otherwise be at your seat before the bell and leave the masks at home.

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