“pediatric hospitalizations are occurring almost exclusively among kids who are not vaccinated. Most school-age children are eligible to have been vaccinated, but most school-age children have not yet been vaccinated. Depending on what numbers you look at, only around 50 to 60 percent of kids ages 12 to 17 have been fully vaccinated, and only around 25 percent of kids ages 5 to 11.”
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“today is not the day to remove mask mandates in schools. Rather, you want to wait until case rates are much lower than they are today. Not simply for the sake of kids, but also so that children aren’t bringing the disease home. But governors are up against political pressures.
The important thing to highlight here is that many of the governors who have lifted mask mandates in the last couple of days have said that the mandateswill be lifted for schools three or four weeks in the future, not today. And three or four weeks in the future, chances are that case rates will be lower, so by then it actually will be much safer to remove the mask mandates without putting kids and communities at high risk, just because there won’t be a lot of circulating COVID.”
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“There are a number of observational studies showing that communities and schools that have universal masking have lower rates of COVID-19 among kids in the school, and a couple of studies suggesting higher rates of transmission within schools that forego masking. And of course, there are manymorestudies in adults and kids in general — really, the preponderance of evidence supports that masks work, and they work for kids as well as for adults.”