Virginia and New York school districts are preparing for a fight to keep mask mandates in place in the face of political and legal challenges despite the weakening scientific case for keeping children masked in the classroom.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order making masks optional in schools has sparked a firestorm in some left-leaning districts, where school officials are still attempting to enforce their mask mandates as they file lawsuits against the order.
In New York, a judge overturned Gov. Kathy Hochul’s mask mandate on Monday because, according to the state Supreme Court, only the Legislature has the authority to issue such sweeping health rules.
Although the ruling temporarily plunged schools and other organizations into uncertainty as to whether they could keep enforcing mask mandates, an appellate court moved on Tuesday evening to keep the mandate in effect while legal challenges proceed, dealing a blow to opponents of the mask mandates.
SEVEN SCHOOL DISTRICTS SUE YOUNGKIN AS ORDER AGAINST MASK MANDATES KICKS IN
A wide range of studies have shown masks can reduce COVID-19 transmission when worn correctly and are especially useful in crowded indoor settings, which classrooms can sometimes be.
But the prevailing wisdom surrounding masking in school has begun to shift in recent months, with relatively weak supporting evidence for the efficacy of masks in school settings and growing concerns about the unintended consequences of covering children’s faces tipping the balance of the debate.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance on masks on Jan. 14 to clarify that N95 masks, or respirators, are the most effective types of face coverings and that the respirators provide more protection than either cloth or surgical masks.
The agency’s change came after some prominent public health experts had begun to question the utility of continuing to wear cloth masks despite evidence that such face coverings do little to protect the wearer.
Dr. Leana Wen, the former president of Planned Parenthood and a public health expert who has consistently advocated for more mitigation efforts, drew attention in December when she acknowledged that cloth masks are “little more than facial decorations.”
The CDC’s update in mid-January was the first time the agency had conceded that some types of masks offer less protection against the virus than other types.
Three prominent scientists argued in a Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday that the CDC’s latest guidelines should pave the way for optional masking in schools.
“Respirators and other high-quality masks are highly effective at protecting their wearers, regardless of what people around them are doing,” the three doctors wrote. “As a result, schools can finally safely make masks optional for students and staff.”
Wading into an aspect of the debate that many public health experts have spent months avoiding, the trio of doctors also argued masking in the classroom has cost students academically, developmentally, and socially.
Scientists have warned that masks can impede the development of communication and social skills in ways that disproportionately harm the youngest learners.
“Because speech transmission is impaired by mask-wearing, there is a risk of misunderstanding when face masks are used widely in schools. Speaking through a face mask may dampen higher frequencies and therefore may impair verbal communication,” Manfred Spitzer, a German neuroscientist, wrote in a September 2020 paper in the Trends in Neuroscience and Education journal.
“In addition, it is well known that visual cues help in speech recognition, which may be an additional cause of face mask induced impairment of speech perception and communication,” Spitzer wrote.
The Biden administration has largely sidestepped questions of whether masks do more harm than good in school.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has repeatedly cited a study that has been heavily criticized for greatly exaggerating the benefits of school mask policies.
The study, a review of COVID-19 outbreaks in schools with and without mask mandates in two Arizona counties, concluded that schools with no mask mandates were 3.5 times more likely to experience an outbreak than the schools that required masks.
A review of the underlying data by the Atlantic in December found the study did not account for the dates schools opened in the fall when reporting their COVID-19 cases as outbreaks. That meant some of the schools in the study with no mask mandates may have been open for as much as twice as long as the masks-required schools studied, which would have given the no-mask schools twice as long to develop an outbreak.
The study also did not take into account vaccination rates at the schools under review, which meant its authors could not account for whether vaccines or masks were keeping cases lower at certain schools.
Yet Walensky pointed to the study as clear evidence masks prevented COVID-19 from spreading in the classroom.
Another CDC study touted as evidence to support masking in schools similarly did not account for the vaccination status of teachers nor the testing rates of students in the 520 counties it reviewed.
The study concluded that in counties with school mask requirements, less than half of children per 100,000 tested positive for COVID-19 than in counties that did not require masks in school.
However, the study appeared to exclude variables that could have explained the difference in child COVID-19 case numbers between counties, such as how much testing was being done in each county and whether community transmission rates happened to be higher in the counties with no-mask schools than the counties with masks-required schools, or vice versa.
The author of the study did not respond to a request from the Washington Examiner for a list of the counties used in the study and which ones had school mask mandates, as well as whether testing data were available for those counties.
A third study that generated headlines for seeming to back up school mask policies involved schools with and without mandates in Michigan when school resumed in fall 2021.
“K-12 schools without mask mandates in Michigan saw 62% more coronavirus spread,” read a Detroit Free Press headline from October, which cited data from the state health department and the University of Michigan.
The underlying data that inspired the headline, however, included a note explaining that masks-required school districts may have implemented other mitigation standards that contributed to their lower COVID-19 rates.
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The conclusions that sparked headlines in the fall were based on a limited window of time, looking at transmission in schools in August and September only.
By December, the disparity in COVID-19 cases between no-mask and masks-required school districts in Michigan had all but disappeared.
The University of Michigan and the state health department conceded that “transmission in other settings” may have, by November, “washed out” the differences in COVID-19 rates between no-mask and masks-required districts.
