Would you believe that forcing middle school children and teachers to wear masks for seven hours a day is a good intervention if a study suggested that a mandate could prevent about eight novel coronavirus infections in an entire school year — about one case per month?

I doubt it, but preventing one case per month is the best-case interpretation of a recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Incredibly, this study is somehow being touted as proof that mask mandates work. You could just as easily point out that the study found that mask-mandatory schools reported nearly three times as many COVID cases as mask-optional schools.