I’d object to people making it pivotal to a policy decision.
But if it had found masks mandates did not reduce cases, i wouldn’t have pointed out its flaws as if that meant masks did reduce cases. Im sure she gets a lot of twitter clicks for it.
Yes, of course. What an odd comment. It’s not even like I used the word “hysterical.”
She gave some rationale, but this week’s lecture hasn’t been posted, yet, so I can’t tell you exactly what her evidence was.
I just looked up how Germany is doing school. they seem to be requiring 2-3 tests per week (antigen), air filters in each classroom, and masks on school grounds but not while seated in class.
What countries are you looking at?
Portugal is requiring less testing than Germany, but is requiring masks for children over 10, and encouraging mask use for younger children.
Austria has pretty much the same rules as Germany, with thrice weekly mandatory covid testing, vaccination for kids over 12, and masks in hallways. Austria also has a big increase in home schooling this year.
Denmark may be doing nothing special regarding covid in schools this year.
The Czech Republic is requiring unvaccinated children to test or mask. Those exempt include anyone who had covid in the last 180 days, as well as those vaccinated.
I’m not seeing that the US is way out of step by urging kids to mask in school.
I don’t think a 5% estimate was that high, considering it was the first month after summer break. But the 1.2% only represents cases for those that were tested. The “true” number of cases is certainly higher for these school-aged kids.
I remember getting into a slightly heated debate on another act. site about the definition and overuse of “outbreak” by the media. 2 cases of polio is an outbreak; 2 cases of Covid is not.
More news about schools and unvaccinated teens:
For those not privy:
Unvaccinated teenagers have been more likely to test positive for the coronavirus than unvaccinated adults in Los Angeles County, officials said.
The trend illustrates how a group less likely to have been vaccinated in the nation’s most populous county is playing an outsize role in continuing transmission of the highly contagious Delta variant.
“The highest case rates have been among unvaccinated teens, who were eight times more likely than vaccinated teens to test positive for COVID and are important drivers of transmission across our communities,” L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a recent briefing.
Previously, health officials had noted that it was younger adults who were most likely to contract the coronavirus.
But the possibilities for contracting the coronavirus have climbed as social gatherings and extracurricular activities for teenagers have resumed. L.A. County’s unvaccinated youths ages 12 to 17 have a monthly coronavirus case rate 32% worse than that of unvaccinated residents younger than 50, according to data collected between Sept. 16 and Oct. 15.
Not coincidentally, it’s young L.A. County residents who are least likely to be vaccinated. While 80% of L.A. County residents eligible for vaccination have received at least one shot, only 70% of 12- to 15-year-olds have done so, as have 76% of those age 16 to 17. By comparison, 98% of residents age 65 to 79 have received at least one shot.
Even though all high-school-age residents have been eligible for the vaccine since May, the relatively high proportion of unvaccinated teens is contributing to reported outbreaks in L.A. County’s schools. Of nearly 1,000 coronavirus cases linked to outbreaks in K-12 schools since August, nearly half were related to youth sports, and all but one of the 21 outbreaks tied to such activities were among high school students.
“Outbreaks among youth sports teams and high schools result in a lot more transmission,” Ferrer said.
Relatively high coronavirus case rates among teens are only more reason to get them and other children vaccinated when they become eligible, said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious-disease expert at UC San Francisco. Coronavirus transmission rates in much of California are still “substantial” or “high,” the worst two categories in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s four-tier scale.
“The chances of becoming infected are real,” said Rutherford, who is also a board-certified pediatrician. “And that’s because not everybody’s vaccinated.”
This is true even in California’s most highly vaccinated counties. In the San Francisco Bay Area, more than 20% of people of all ages are not fully vaccinated; in L.A. and Orange counties, more than 30% are not fully vaccinated, and “that’s plenty to sustain transmission,” Rutherford said.
“This is not a disease that you want to have in childhood or in adulthood. You just don’t want to have it, period,” Rutherford said. “While this epidemic is at full tilt, you need to protect your kids as best as you can. And vaccination is a very important way to do that.”
According to the CDC, 791 people under age 18 have died from COVID-19 nationwide, and more than 5.4 million have tested positive for the coronavirus. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that at least 24,000 children have been hospitalized for COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic in 24 states and New York City, which release data on hospitalizations by age group.
There is one significant post-vaccination side effect that officials have been monitoring: myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart.
There have been rare instances of the condition following vaccination, notably among males age 12 to 17. A clinical trial involving a few thousand 5- to 11-year-olds found no reports of myocarditis among those who received the Pfizer vaccine, but because the trial was relatively small, more monitoring will be needed to determine whether post-vaccination myocarditis will end up emerging as the vaccine is distributed more broadly.
Available data show that getting myocarditis from the vaccine is much less likely than getting it from COVID-19, Rutherford said.
Rutherford also cited data showing that among children younger than 16 who had contact with hospitals from March 2020 to January 2021, those suffering from COVID-19 were 36.8 times more likely to suffer from myocarditis than those who did not have COVID-19.
The CDC says that as of Oct. 20, federal agencies had confirmed 963 reports of myocarditis among vaccinated people age 30 and younger, most commonly among those who got either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, particularly in males. Those low numbers indicate that post-vaccination myocarditis is rare, and other data suggest that even when it does happen, it appears to be far more benign than other forms of myocarditis, Rutherford said, and goes away quickly with rest.
The median length of hospitalization is six days for COVID-19 and one day for vaccine-related myocarditis, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“Vaccine-associated myocarditis is less severe, and patients recover quickly without intervention. So, yes, I think the calculus for vaccination is far, far in favor of vaccinating, and I strongly recommend it,” Rutherford said.
Of six scenarios considered by the FDA of the potential benefits and risks of the vaccine for those age 5 to 11, five clearly showed that vaccinations result in the benefit of more children avoiding hospitalization from COVID-19 than might potentially contract post-vaccine myocarditis.
The one scenario that was debatable involved a projection that COVID-19 hospitalizations would fall to very low levels — just 10% of what was reported in mid-September. In that scenario, the model found that vaccinations would cause more cases of vaccine-related myocarditis than would avert hospitalizations due to COVID-19.
However, even in that scenario, when one considers how COVID-19 hospitalization in children causes far more severe illness than vaccine-related myocarditis, “the overall benefits of the vaccine may still outweigh the risks,” Hong Yang, a senior advisor for benefit-risk assessment for the FDA, told an advisory committee to the agency.
Rutherford said the assumptions in that scenario — that hospitalizations would fall to a very low level — are unlikely to occur in the near future. “I find that preposterous,” he said.
For the scenarios that he considered more plausible, “the risk of myocarditis from naturally acquired infection is higher than the rare risk from vaccine.”
Children who get infected with the coronavirus also have a rare risk of developing a serious condition that usually requires hospitalization. Of children who are hospitalized for the rare COVID-related condition Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, or MIS-C, preliminary data suggest that 8% to 9% are diagnosed with myocarditis.
Nationally, there have been 5,217 reports of MIS-C, 46 of which have resulted in death. In California, there have been 677 reports of MIS-C, six of which have resulted in death. Between 60% and 70% of patients with MIS-C require intensive care.
Some experts were hopeful that the lowered vaccination dosage for young children, who will be given one-third as much vaccine as those 12 and older, will reduce the chance of side effects like post-vaccination myocarditis.
Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, a deputy health officer for Orange County, concurred that post-vaccination myocarditis, when it happens, usually results in minor symptoms that last only a couple of days and can be treated with Motrin.
Chinsio-Kwong said she is far more worried about the long-term health consequences should unvaccinated children get COVID-19.
“My concern is that you would be looking at a more severe impact on your heart and your cardiovascular system that would have more long-term consequences,” Chinsio-Kwong said.
It’s those kinds of concerns that caused her to get one of her sons vaccinated as soon as the Pfizer vaccine was eligible for him, and why she is eager to get a younger son vaccinated as soon as he becomes eligible.
“The last thing I want is for any of my kids to get COVID,” Chinsio-Kwong said. “When you hear from the pediatricians of the Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome that can occur months after exposure to COVID, it is very scary. We want our children to really do well.”
Chinsio-Kwong said there is concern that some children who have survived COVID-19 have higher rates of depression or anxiety, difficulty concentrating in school or long-term headaches.
“There’s obviously many other consequences that can occur beyond the COVID infection itself. And we really don’t know how long that affects that child — if it goes all the way to their adulthood,” Chinsio-Kwong said.
Illness that lasts a month or more after a coronavirus infection — known as long COVID — can happen in children. A study recently published in the journal Lancet Child and Adolescent Health said that among more than 1,700 British children age 5 to 17 with symptomatic COVID, 4.4% had symptoms that persisted for 28 days or more, and 1.8% had symptoms that persisted for at least 56 days. Common long COVID symptoms included headache and fatigue.
Vaccinations reduce the likelihood not only of coming down with COVID-19 but of suffering from long COVID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert, said recently. Fauci cited a study in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases that said that fully vaccinated people were half as likely as unvaccinated people to report long COVID symptoms.
Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of UC San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, said allowing a population of kids to remain unvaccinated only increases the probability of ongoing coronavirus spread.
Wachter said we cannot count on COVID-19 disappearing any time soon, and we’re likely to enter into a state of relatively stable, and fairly high, levels of infection.
“There are simply too many unvaccinated people, too many regions where precautions are out the window, and then you have waning immunity from both vaccination and from natural infection — all of this makes counting on COVID going away a fool’s errand,” Wachter wrote in an email. “It’ll be with us, and so the justification for childhood vaccination will remain robust.”
Shane Crotty, a professor at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology, said in a tweet that if he had children age 5 to 11, he would get them the Pfizer vaccine as soon as they became eligible.
Crotty, too, wrote that the myocarditis associated with vaccination is transient and mild, with most patients hospitalized for observation, rather than treatment. “So, not super concerning, compared to viral infection myocarditis which can have severe long term consequences,” Crotty wrote.
So my kids came home from school yesterday and informed me that there is no longer a mask mandate at the school. Apparently there was some state SC case last week that removed the statewide school mandate. Which is odd since the state SC is heavily D here.
also worth noting is cases in my area are their highest since the peak of pandemic.
Will your kids still plan to wear masks? Our town is getting hit hard. All Fareway employees are wearing masks.
Good for your state SC.
I discovered a guy I work with has been part of the effort to sue his state over their mask mandate, I think it’ll go to his state’s SC
short answer is no, but I have mixed feelings about it.
I would have liked to see the school take the masks mandates through the semester (why drop them 2 weeks before holiday?). I would like to have had a little more notice so I could have gotten kids vaccinated sooner. The plan was to get them vaxxed between xmas and new years already. Since kids have been masked at school, I have noticed a significant reduction of colds in the family, so im not under some illusion that masks are doing nothing.
on the flip side: Now that masks are not required, only a small % of kids are wearing them. Without a large amount of kids masking, im not convinced it will make much difference if my kids do (I know, regressive group think). All family members around the kids are also vaccinated, so the risk of spread is somewhat mitigated and covid in children seems to be less risk of severe illness.
Its hard to demand my kids wear masks all day when they know I dont do the same. Also there is no way I could really enforce it at this point- I know they hate wearing them and I would have to be pretty demanding to get them to continue wearing them, even though all their friends have stopped. Lastly, we live in red country…people wearing masks here is seen as a sign of foolish political submission to liberal wokeness. So making my kids wear masks is going to alienate them socially. I wish that wasnt the case, but its reality. I have no plans to put my kids on the battle front as culture warriors.
I agree with the SC ruling, but disagree slightly with the policy at the local school.
Got an email yesterday that our elementary school is having 3 classrooms going full virtual for the next week (until xmas break) due to high case counts (greater than 15 cases combined in those 3 rooms). Luckily our kid’s class is not one of them.
Same thing here. It drives me nuts when I hear the politicians cite ineffectiveness of masks for the reason to stop a mandate, and that a recent surge is even more proof they don’t work. Call it what it is - vaccines have been around enough for everyone in the schools to get one and there is a declining justification to continue enforcing a policy that is mostly protecting the holdouts, especially when masks generally are annoying to wear. It is pretty pointless to join the voluntary crowd to continue wearing a mask when it is a small minority.
That timeline is frustrating if they just dropped it overnight. There have been a mix of timelines in the districts near me, mostly in January. Mine is the most aggressive nearby and would not allow enough time for any kids to go from 0 to full vaccinated when they return from the break. If you are going to drop it on the basis that it is only the holdouts that are really left…at least give the holdouts a chance to react before you rip off the remaining mitigation efforts.
I don’t know what state LH is in, but it sounds like it was dropped because the state SC ruled against the mandate. I don’t think a district gets to say, “OK, we understand that it’s illegal/unconstitutional, but we’re going to keep this around a little bit longer to give people time to adjust.”
to clarify, by the state SC repealing the mandate, it left the choice back to the school districts to do whatever they want.
the SC decision was only that the state cannot force the schools to do it.
very much agree with this post. Especially the ‘call it what it is’ part.
We are not dropping mask mandates because they dont work. We are dropping them because 1: after 2 years of mandates, they have proven to be unaccepted by society. and 2: we have better mitigation tools available. I think the Gov of CO gave a speech saying as much last week in a very blunt tone of ‘you had a chance to get vaxxed, its your darn problem now’.