Scientific American : Masks Protect Schoolkids from COVID

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An excellent summary of research supporting the use of masks by children to prevent Covid spread. Refutes the anti-vax lies about masks being ineffective and dangerous:

On July 30 Florida governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order barring local school districts from requiring their students to wear masks, claiming that mask mandates in schools lack “a well-grounded scientific justification.” On August 27, when a Leon County, Florida, judge suspended the governor’s ban, DeSantis’s office maintained that there was no evidence that masks prevent infection in schools, issuing a statement that the ruling was “not based in science and facts.” (The order is currently being appealed.)

DeSantis is wrong. And so is Texas governor Greg Abbott, who banned schools in his state from requiring masks and is suing some school districts for mandating them. There are multiple lines of evidence from a variety of disciplines—including materials science, infectious diseases, pediatrics and epidemiology—showing that masks can help protect children and teachers from getting COVID in schools.

For starters, laboratory experiments show that masks block the respiratory droplets and aerosols that transmit SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. In one test, mechanical engineer David Rothamer and his team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison used a machine in a classroom to pump out particles of the same size as those that carry the virus. The researchers placed several CPR dummies wearing masks around the room and measured the degree to which the aerosols penetrated the masks. A surgical mask paired with a soft frame to ensure a snug fit reduced the chances of penetration and infection by 382 times when compared with going maskless, according to a statistical probability model. Even if real-world situations produce lower numbers, Rothamer says, masks significantly reduce viral transmission.

In that real world, several epidemiological studies also indicate that masks in schools work. Researchers at the ABC Science Collaborative have collected data from more than a million K–12 students and staff members in North Carolina, which mandated masking in schools from August 2020 until July 2021. The scientists reported little in-school transmission over the fall, winter or summer months. Incidents remained low even as, in communities outside the schools, levels of COVID cases fluctuated and mitigation strategies shifted. “The presence of masking in schools seems to be the unifying theme across all of those periods,” says Ibukun Kalu, a member of the group and medical director of pediatric infection prevention at Duke University. “When we look at cases that have masking in place—so masking students, staff, everyone that’s within that K–12 setting—we see rates of within-school spread as low as one percent.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/masks-protect-schoolkids-from-covid-despite-what-antiscience-politicians-claim/