The Grand School Experiment Begins Anew
If Only We'd Paid Attention Last Year
So after an all too short summer vacation today is my daughter’s first day back in preschool where thank god, she won’t have to wear a mask or be subject to any other arbitrary Covid restrictions. This isn’t a big deal for us, since the same was true all last year, but I imagine it would come as a shock to a large portion of California’s who get their Covid news in the form of Media Panic. As predicted, the current Media Panic is centered around schools, most prominently whether children should be wearing masks, but even whether the schools should be open at all?!
The current nexus of the Media hysteria centers around Florida, and the narrative goes that their Evil Governor Ron DEATH-Santis has “BANNED MASK MANDATES”!!
As an aside I find the term “ban mask mandates” slightly Orwellian. Somehow restrictions on the government’s abilities to impose on my children have never felt so harsh. I’d prefer “Leaves Masking Choice to Parents” or “Has Common Sense”…
While Florida makes all the headlines, it’s not just Florida, it fact Eight States currently have policies in place which leave student masking decision up to the parents, and these eight states represent about a quarter off all K-12 enrollments in the country. These “free states” are offset by Nine states which mandate masks for all students, and these nine states also represent about a quarter of all students. In the middle we have the remaining states which leave mask mandating policies to local governments and school districts. Taken together these 8 “free states” and 9 “restriction states” will be running a “Grand Experiment” this school year, needless as it may be since we already know the results from last year…
It seems the stories in Florida are able to gain so much traction in blue states like California because Florida it effectively a year ahead of California on getting back to school. Whereas most Californian schools didn’t ever make it back to full time schooling last spring, Florida was 100% full time all 2020/2021 school year beginning in the fall! Effectively we Californians are only Now getting to the point were Florida was a year ago.
So given this fact, given that we have a year of data in states like Florida to learn from, one would think we would look at that data to see what worked and what didn’t. Florida mandated that all schools be open full time last year, but it didn’t set masking policy at the state level. This makes it possible to compare how schools fared that did or didn’t impose mask mandates, and the results are unsurprising to those of us who know that masks don’t work…
No statistical difference between masked and unmasked schools. Cases went up and down along with the general ebb and flow of Covid cases within the state regardless of masking policies. And the data gets even more striking than that! Professor Oster, who published the Florida study, runs a School Covid Response Dashboard tracking schools across the country which actually shows higher cases rates in schools with masks mandates:
And higher cases rates among staff in full distance learning than in person schooling!
This data really drives home what has been known for over a year now. Schools are Safe! and the next key takeaway here is that schools are safe regardless of masking policies, they’re just an unnecessary distraction. A year ago DeSantis could tolerate masks as leverage to ensure schools remained open, but with a year of data the decision to leave that choice up to the parents is not a rash one, it’s a rational policy informed by evidence and experience in the third largest states in the nation. A state which has followed the actual science and the actual evidence on Covid better than almost any other. And it’s not new data. The data that schools were safe and that masks weren’t necessary was already available from spring 2020 out of Europe in countries that never closed schools to begin with.
Be that as it may, our Public Health Betters have one more out, the “Delta Variant”, and the message that “The War Has Changed”. They may concede that schools were safe last year, they may even concede that masks weren’t necessary last year, but all that data is now useless, they will say, because we are fighting a “new form” of the virus. Reject this narrative!
While Delta does appear to be more contagious, it defies reason that masks would fail against older strains of the virus, but then become effective against a more contagious strain. Anyone claiming masks are essential “because of Delta” either doesn’t know the data, or assumes the persons they are advocating won’t call them on it.
And much more importantly Delta does not affect kids to a greater degree, the CDC’s own data continues to show this. Children remain safer from Covid than the seasonal flu, in fact unvaccinated children remain safer from Covid than fully vaccinated 30 year olds!
Closing schools was never about the kids, it was about teachers who feared catching the virus and the unions who had the power to grant their wishes. With vaccines now available to all there are no excuses left! So as California’s prepare for our first full year of school after the pandemic, we should look to Florida’s example from a year ago. We can let this “Grand Experiment” run for another year, but Why Bother?! Get back to work, Keep the Schools Open, and Leave the Masks off the Kids!
Anyway 0 and 2…