No, Masks Don't Help Keep Kids in School...
Like so much we've been told by our public health officials, the opposite is true.
Emily Burns and Josh Stevenson

by Emily Burns, with Josh Stevenson, and Phil Kerpen

One of the reasons we were told masks were essential for school kids this year was that masks would reduce the likelihood of school closures, by reducing disease incidence. Unfortunately, like so much the CDC has promised, the opposite turns out to be true.

Children in masked districts experienced, on average, 4-times the number of disrupted learning days as those in mask-optional districts (Figure 1). The same districts also had 2.5 times higher case rates during the same period as we demonstrated in analysis published on March 9th, 2022.

Figure 1


Source: Weekly data on mask policies for top 500 school districts, and school closures collected by www.burbio.com. Analysis by Emily Burns, Josh Stevenson, and Phil Kerpen.
This result is as important as it was expected. The CDC promised that whatever potential (and willfully ignored) harms might come to children from two full years of forced masking, they must be risked, due to the added safety and schooling that masking would ensure. Neither claim ended up being true. As we demonstrated in our analysis of March 9th, during the January peak of the omicron wave, masked districts had 2.5-fold higher case rates than un-masked districts. Yet, during the same period, as we saw in Figure 1 above, those same schools experienced more than 4-fold higher rates of school disruptions—significantly higher rates of disruption even than their increases in case rates.

Figure 2


Source: Case Rates for Masked and Un-Masked School Districts in 2021-22 School year. Burns & Stevenson. Mask policy data, Burbio.
January, when the omicron wave peaked, naturally, saw the highest rates of school closures. Virtually all school closures in February were among masked schools.

Figures 3 and 4-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Maybe those kids need protection from her.

And, didn't she just get over another case of covid? She knows, in her dim and semi-aware way, that masks don't really work.