Well, imagine my shock that school districts in Colorado requiring masks have lower COVID transmission. How much lower if they also used good ventilation, HEPA filters, outdoor lunch, etc. (1/x)
2/ @CDPHE data via @johningold showing COVID cases for school-age kids in #Colorado districts w/ mask mandates (blue) are lower than those w/o mandates (orange). Yellow bar shows in-person school return.
But 6-17 yr cases very different at county level, so these wrap together.
3/ More data from @CDPHE via @johningold. Overall, COVID cases in 0-5 & 6-11 yrs age groups (no vax approval yet) still hovering near their peak levels as a Colorado state average.
4/ Not to keep beating a dead horse --
but, until school-aged children in the state (and everywhere) have widespread access to being fully vaccinated, schools and the rest of society owe it to them and ourselves to apply reasonable prevention strategies.
Preprint: "Echoes Through Time: The Historical Origins of the Droplet Dogma & its Role in the Misidentification of Airborne Respiratory Infection Transmission"
3/ If you want to digest aspects of the story in deeper form, spoon-fed via Twitter thread, this is a long 🧵 that @jljcolorado put together in May along similar lines:
🔥 by @DrAliceVirgil1 in @PsychToday. She argues indoor school meals are not only dangerous during COVID, but further destabilize a sense of truth and reality among gaslit students.
2/ "The term gaslighting comes from the 1944 film Gaslight ... invalidating her reality and understanding of her experiences."
"Trust in the person or entity doing the gaslighting is essential for it to be an effective tool to undermine a person’s entire perception of reality."
3/ "Yet, every day in countless lunchrooms across America, as both the New York and Chicago school districts have noted, children are eating and talking loudly, unmasked, in crowded indoor spaces without proper ventilation."
Article w/ tips on childrens' masks, by @BetsyMorris2. (🧵 & info, 1/x)
My quotes didn’t make article cut, but I agree w/ many others who have said priority order is: 1) Wearability (quality irrelevant if kid won’t wear) 2) Tight fit 3) Filtration quality wsj.com/articles/findi…
2/ In the context of kid masks, it’s worth following @masknerd and looking through great contributions he has made to provide test data & evaluations of various adult and kid masks:
2/ Also important: N95s are not limited due to a supply chain shortage. True for months and why the CDC finally updated their guidance yesterday. @projectn95 is a non-profit that provides a marketplace for vetted masks at low price: shop.projectn95.org/all/
3/ Any mask is better than no mask, but given the highly contagious Delta variant that now dominates, you should wear the best mask you can. See this great interview clip with @mtosterholm motivating the use of upgraded masks:
2/ Parents here realized that if adults need to be very careful w/ indoor dining when masks are off, so do school kids during lunch. @HeidiNBC: "Here's what they do. It's not hard. They open these doors, the kids come out."
3/ #DrFauci today" "You have pretty good prevention measures at the time you’re in the class or working, and then you let your guard down when you get a lunchbreak and you take your mask off, b/c you have to take your mask off to eat."
ICYMI, @By_CJewett did an excellent job last week on #ScienceFriday w/ @iraflatow. Worth a 14-min listen on key points about air cleaners for school & elsewhere.
2/ I think this bit from @By_CJewett takes it home:
"Your HEPA filter is kind of like a pair of kaki pants or a garden hose. It's not on-patent, it's not expensive, it's not that hard to find, and there's not a salesforce for it." soundcloud.com/scifri/are-hig…
3/ "But what you do see is the more electronic air cleaners. Those are the companies going to the school boards, talking about ionization ... they sound spectacular"