Mask Mandates Being Reinstated For All Public Schools?
All public school students, teachers, and staff in Passaic, New Jersey, are now required to wear masks again. The mask mandates will also apply to visitors to public schools throughout the district. The requirement is being reinstated because the area’s illness rate has risen to meet the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) criteria for face coverings.
According to the U.S. government’s COVID-19 Public Education Campaign, the CDC recently issued updated guidance for dealing with the virus. When local infection numbers reach medium or high community levels, mask mandates are recommended. The CDC provides an online tool for checking each county’s current level of infection which is color-coded to correspond to masking requirements.
Passaic County was shown as having high levels of COVID-19 on December 22, 2022. Wearing a high-quality mask or respirator is recommended, but the CDC says that any mask is better than no mask. In addition to mask mandates, Passaic residents are also advised to avoid non-essential public indoor activities where exposure risk is particularly high.
The CDC has a webpage to educate people in detail on the best types of face protection to use when mask mandates are in effect. It says, “Loosely woven cloth products provide the least protection, layered finely woven products offer more protection, well-fitting disposable surgical masks and KN95s offer even more protection, and well-fitting NIOSH-approved respirators (including N95s) offer the highest level of protection.” A key factor in proper masking is having a close fit without any gaps around the nose or along the edges.
Masks are designed to contain particles and droplets that you breathe, cough, or sneeze out. When they fit snugly, they can also provide some protection from particles that unmasked people exhale. Although the CDC strongly recommends close-fitting masks as a protection against COVID-19, some argue that their ability to stop the virus is questionable.
This is largely due to the tiny size of virus particles and how few people wear masks properly during mask mandates. Children especially are prone to constantly touching their masks, which can transfer viruses to their hands and onto other children. In a City Journal article, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Jeffrey H. Anderson, said of the disposable surgical masks most of us wear, “Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses.”
Anderson’s article delves in-depth into the importance of randomized controlled trials, or RCTs when assessing the efficacy of mask mandates. In medical research, RCTs are considered superior to observational studies but Anderson says that none of the studies the CDC provides to justify its masking advice were RCTs. “In general, observational studies are not only of lower quality than RCTs but also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researcher’s judgment more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RCTs, to finding what one wants to find.”
Passaic Public Schools shared a letter in English and Spanish on their Facebook page explaining the return to mask mandates. In it, Superintendent of Schools, Sandra Diodonet, said that the mask mandate will be lifted when the county returns to moderate or low levels of COVID-19. Parents expressed a variety of perspectives in the comments section, from simple notes of thanks to accusing the district of child cruelty due to how masks interfere with learning language skills.
Most of the comments were against mask mandates for children. One parent shared this link to a compilation of 150 comparative studies and articles about mask effectiveness and harms, published by the Multiple Sclerosis Center of Arizona. Another quoted Leana Wen, M.D., a medical analyst for CNN, who said that two things can be true at once: masks work to reduce transmission, but they also could harm young learners.
