Mandatory Masking Policies Were Never Going to Work in Elementary Schools: Ask a Third-Grade Teacher

Ian Miller and Michael Betrus recently laid out a very strong case that masking kids at school isn’t working. Using data from across the nation, they concluded that “there is no discernible difference between outcomes of infection or hospitalization for kids in communities where face masks are required in school and those where face coverings are optional.”

Here I’ll try to answer the question of why masks are not working. My wife teaches third grade. If you spent a day with her, you’d understand that mandatory masking policies in elementary schools were put in place by people who either do not understand virus transmission, or do not understand 8-year-olds.

The basic rationale for why masks should reduce COVID transmission was put forth by CDC Director Rachel Wolensky in a public service announcement a few months ago, and in guidance on the CDC website. Based on controlled lab studies, the CDC Director suggested that masks reduce transmission by greater than 80%. She was not referring exclusively to high-quality masks such as valveless N95 masks, but even multi-layer cloth masks.

It appears as if the CDC Director assumed that 80% reduction of virus-laden droplets by masks equated to 80% reduction in infection. Given that real-world studies of COVID vaccine effectiveness typically show the vaccines to be less than 80% effective against infection (particularly after more than a month and against newer COVID variants active at the time of Wolensky’s announcement), the CDC Director was unwittingly implying that masks provide as good or better protection against COVID infection than vaccines (a statement for which she was derided). Ironically, that implication may turn out to be true, as COVID vaccines and booster shots administered more than three months ago provide almost no protection against infection with Omicron (while still providing protection against serious disease).

The point here is not to push back on the assumptions, or quibble with the numbers, or mock Wolensky. Let’s assume the 80% containment figure is correct, and that 80% containment of airborne particles by masks provides 80% protection against infection. Even then, policymakers have neglected the fact that an elementary school is not a controlled laboratory setting. Things operate a little differently.

Masks may indeed work well to reduce disease transmission when Dr. Wolensky meets with Dr. Fauci and President Biden. They may meet in person for an hour (if one of them is sick, that person would not attend the meeting), during which time they will keep their masks in place. They might be using high-quality N95 masks. Their masks are new, or reasonably new, or recently sanitized. They will probably avoid shaking hands, and Biden will probably refrain from sniffing Wolensky’s hair. There won’t be a lot of yelling or singing or forceful exhalations that would emit more virus particles. In that setting, masks might indeed be quite effective. When the meeting is over, they will likely retreat to the sanctity of their private offices or homes and shed their masks.

The implicit assumptions include: quality masks, clean masks, continuous mask wearing, minimal physical contact, actively sick people staying home, and good hygiene.

Dr. Wolensky, Dr. Fauci, President Biden, governors, mayors, superintendents, and everyone else: let me introduce you to a typical third grade classroom in 2022.

My wife teaches third grade at a public elementary school with a mask mandate. As background, I should note that this school year, teaching has been conducted entirely in person (for much of last school year, a hybrid instructional format was used, with some students in person and some on-line). My wife teaches for roughly seven hours per day while wearing a mask. During periods of high COVID infection, such as now, there is virtually no down time. She has no office to retreat to after a 1-hour meeting to shed her mask. Quite obviously, neither do the students. The students are also expected to wear their masks all day, except during recess and while eating. Her classroom is small, windows are closed, and desks are within three feet of each other. It is an older facility and a Title 1 school, with average ratings on websites such as GreatSchools. On balance, it is a fairly typical elementary school.

Her first unmistakable contact with COVID in the classroom came one day in early January, 2021 (before vaccines were available to teachers in Virginia). A sick child came to school and mentioned that both of her parents had COVID and were apparently too sick to take care of their daughter. So the little girl was sent to school instead.

My wife has been periodically swimming in a pool of COVID ever since. She is doubly vaccinated and was subsequently infected with COVID. This past Monday, roughly 40% of her students were absent, many of whom were presumably out sick. One or more of them, whether knowingly or not, likely had Omicron. One day during the previous week, eight children in her school were symptomatic while at school, sent to the school nurse, tested positive for COVID, and sent home.

At this point, my wife is not concerned for her own safety regarding COVID. She assumes that it will be present in her classroom on any given day.

Just to make the obvious point, COVID is everywhere in a school that rigorously requires masks. Looking at it objectively, it’s hard to argue that masks in that environment have prevented spread of COVID in the school or community.

This past week (when 40% of her class was already absent), one of the students in my wife’s class was quite ill, too sick to meaningfully participate. The student was twice sent to the school nurse. Unfortunately, the school was out of COVID tests, and there was a stream of other sick children being sent to the nurse’s office. The student was sent back to class both times, where my wife permitted her to rest at a table next to my wife’s desk.

Two days later, my wife was sent home after arriving at school. The student had gone to a doctor and tested positive for COVID, and the parent informed the school about the positive test (notification which is not required and often does not happen). My wife was deemed a close contact and sent home, as were the students who sat directly next to the infected child. Students one desk removed were not sent home.

My wife (twice-vaccinated and possessive of natural immunity after a subsequent COVID infection) was forced to take sick leave until the end of a 5-day quarantine period. It has now been more than five months since her second vaccination, but less than six months. Not long ago, she still would have qualified as fully vaccinated (within a 6-month window as opposed to a 5-month window), and therefore would not have been forced to take sick leave. Because of the definitional change, and notwithstanding that she had a documented COVID infection roughly four months ago, she has been forced to take sick leave.

She was informed that if she went out and got a booster shot, she could return to school, as she would then qualify as vaccinated.

Let’s unpack all this, as there are a lot of bad policies jumbled together, but we’ll particularly examine the mask requirement as applied to a third-grade classroom (and not a controlled lab experiment). Importantly, no blame is attached here to the children, their parents, the school, its employees, or the school system. They are doing their best to make the best of a bad situation made far worse by bad policies.

1. Children are sent to school when they are clearly sick (in addition to being sent to school with asymptomatic COVID). This happens all the time. Many parents don’t have jobs that afford them the ability to stay home with sick children.

Policymakers living in Bethesda perhaps don’t have as much familiarity with this issue. If they haven’t sent their children to Sidwell Friends or Georgetown Day, their children are in elite public schools. Sick children have nannies to take care of them, or stay-at-home mothers, or parents who can work from home (and mostly have done so during the pandemic). Nevertheless, I’m sure those schools also have plenty of students in attendance with active COVID infections.

I am not blaming the parents who send children to school under these conditions. Perhaps children should not be sent to school when they are sick and infectious, but it happens. Perhaps the parents don’t know their child is sick. Perhaps they think their child is faking or exaggerating illness (who wants to go to school and wear a mask all day when you can stay home and play games?). Perhaps they can’t stay home that day to take care of their child. Perhaps they rationalize that so many other kids come to school sick already, what’s one more in the mix? Perhaps they went to school sick when they were kids. Perhaps they recognize that COVID is less risky for young children than the flu. Perhaps they believe that it is important for the child to be in school so that the child does not fall behind, particularly after so much education has been skipped over the past two years.

The reason is irrelevant. For what it’s worth, when I was a child, I went to school sick all the time. The simple fact is that sick kids come to school. When they are there, they tend to do what they normally do (e.g., yell, hug, push, open doors), all of which spread infectious germs. And the sick kids also tend to cough.

2. Let’s talk about coughing. As anyone can understand, sneezing into a mask and then wearing that snotty mask all day long is gross. Especially if it happens 68 times over the course of a day. Instead, the children typically pull the masks down or out prior to coughing. This behavior is not limited to kids – Joe Biden does the same thing. Perhaps CDC needs to commission a new study showing how much virus is captured by a fist in the general vicinity of a coughing mouth. According to Mythbusters, the answer is not much.

After pulling down the masks, a child will (sometimes) cough into an obstacle such as their hands. What happens next? If you’re Joe Biden, perhaps you shake someone’s hand. I don’t think the CDC factored that into the equation. If you’re a third grader, perhaps you wipe that germ-ridden hand on your pants leg, or the underside of your seat, or the top of the desk. Or maybe it’s not a particularly wet cough, so you just let it linger on your hands. A few minutes later, you open the door handle to go out for recess, wrestle with your classmates, share your food, or hug your teacher. All the while the CDC Director broadcasts that masks cut down airborne virus (and infection) by 80 percent.

3. The CDC and policymakers appear to rely on studies such as this well-controlled study which used an optical measurement method to evaluate the efficacy of masks to reduce the transmission of respiratory droplets during speech. The study is thorough, and shows excellent protection afforded by many types of face masks, in contrast with minimal protection afforded by some other masks. However, this well-controlled study examined speakers/particles for period of 40 seconds while masks were properly fitted.

A school day is over 500 times longer than these 40-second periods. What about the other 99.8% of the day?

Masks are worn for hours at a time in a diligent and disciplined manner by, for example, workers in a BL2 containment facility, or by medical practitioners. When the risks are lower, in more normal settings, masks tend not be worn properly, For example, when people are speaking, (even President Biden), the masks tend often fall below the nose, where they are eventually tugged north by non-hygienic hands that introduce particles to the exterior of the masks.

Most people don’t enjoy wearing masks, and remove or lower them when possible. Witness the plethora of policymakers who have pushed mask mandates, then flagrantly violated them. Even Dr. Fauci.

If lawmakers in the public eye who have pushed mask mandates can’t keep them on, what do you think happens with a third grader stuck in a classroom all day long? Many masks fit poorly, or are intentionally fitted poorly to provide more breathing space and less airflow obstruction. Students will break masks on purpose so they can walk down to the office to get a new mask. Masks are pulled down intentionally, or slide down over time. When a mask slides down, students are typically not in a hurry to pull it back up. “No running in the halls” has been replaced by “Pull your mask up”.

I’m an old man now, riddled with injuries, but if you test me in a controlled setting, and tell me to run for 40 seconds, I could keep up a decent pace. Extrapolating those results over two minutes, let alone seven hours, would be a mistake. But that’s what the CDC has done.

If the mask protection experiment was repeated using individual schoolchildren as subjects, the results would be almost the same. Yet anyone who actually tried to duplicate that experiment in a classroom with 20 kids over a seven-hour period would immediately realize the folly of assuming a close correlation between (i) virus containment by masks during 40 seconds of speech and (ii) virus infection over the course of a day, or month, or year.

4. Many students have high-quality masks that substantially reduce particle flow through the masks. Other students wear poor-quality, single-ply masks. In either case, masks are often not fitted properly.

5. I have yet to see a controlled clinical study looking at the effect of unwashed masks (perhaps used every day for weeks) upon COVID transmission and infection. At the end of last school year, some masks that had started white had turned a brownish gray color. The COVID virus has a limited lifetime on surfaces, but limited does not mean zero. Hands touch the facemask countless times each day. When a student pulls down their mask, coughs into their hand, uses that hand to raise the mask (perhaps introducing COVID from the hand onto the outside of the mask), then talks/breathes/coughs, what happens to the virus particles on the outside of the mask? How is that possibility figured into the CDC’s controlled experiments?

There are a few other things in my wife’s day, not related to the mask requirement, which immediately jump out as symptomatic of the absurdity of America’s COVID policies.

6. Elementary schools ought to have COVID tests. We have a nationwide shortage of rapid COVID tests. The fact that asymptomatic people are forced to get tested all over America to prove they don’t have COVID means that symptomatic people can’t get tested.

I have a son in college who is subject to not only: mandatory indoor masking, mandatory COVID vaccination, and now a mandatory COVID booster shot, but he is also required to test twice weekly for COVID. Testing asymptomatic, thrice-vaccinated college students at virtually no risk themselves of serious illness from COVID is an extraordinary waste of time, money, and resources at any point, but especially during a period of high COVID infection rates and a shortage of rapid tests.

This juxtaposition is exemplary of all that is wrong with American COVID policies: my wife’s elementary school does not have rapid COVID tests for sick children in elementary schools, while my son’s elite university stockpiles COVID tests by the truckload to conduct pointless, twice-weekly testing of asymptomatic young adults.

7. It has been between 5 and 6 months since my wife’s last vaccination. Accordingly, by today’s rules, she is considered unvaccinated.

Yet a little over four months ago, she had COVID, and numerous studies have clearly shown that natural immunity provides as good or better protection against COVID infection/hospitalization/death than vaccines. Why is natural immunity not taken into consideration? And why is 4.9 months post-vaccination considered protected, but not 5.1 months (which is perhaps particularly amusing when one considers that she was previously infected with COVID one month after being vaccinated)? Where is the study showing this magic number of five months? Against which variant? And since my wife was vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine, which shows greater durability of protection against infection than other vaccines, shouldn’t that be taken into account?

Our COVID policies are not only not working; they were never going to work in elementary schools.

Notwithstanding any controlled experiments in a lab setting, the reality is that schools are inundated during COVID waves with sick students. Children often don’t wear high-quality masks, or clean masks. Over the course of a seven-hour day, masks are often not positioned properly, particularly during the most important seconds when a sick child sneezes. Germs are then freely passed between children.

For a person with a rudimentary understanding of COVID transmission, all it would take is one day in a COVID-infested, mask-mandated, third grade classroom to understand the folly of these policies.

PS – The good news is that newly inaugurated Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has issued an executive order allowing parents to choose whether or not their children wear masks in school.