Mask mandates are the ‘most damaging’ to young people: Former Levi Strauss and Co. executive
Former Levi Strauss and Co. executive Jennifer Sey reacts to the California school that called an officer to remove a 4-year-old student from campus for not wearing a mask on ‘Fox & Friends Weekend.’
COVID cases remain stubbornly high at the start of another school year, and districts are again facing decisions about how to open schools safely. Mask mandates are taking center stage, but this year it looks like most school districts have learned to ignore masking guidance coming from the CDC.
Current CDC guidance recommends universal school masking in 42 percent of US counties based on local case rates and hospital capacity. Yet, most school districts will begin the school year mask optional, leaving masking choices up to families. For many districts, this represents a stark pivot from the past two years.
Why are so few districts masking now? Because the CDC undermined its own authority on school masking, and taught schools to ignore its own guidance.
Last summer, during July 2021’s delta variant surge, the CDC tightened school masking guidelines to recommend universal indoor masking in schools across the country. In September 2021, four in ten students were in districts that ignored CDC guidance and kept masks optional. Despite stark changes in the pandemic threat over the course of the school year, four in five students were in districts that maintained their mask policies into February.
PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICTS IMPLEMENTING COVID RESTRICTIONS MEET FEROCIOUS COMMUNITY PUSHBACK
And February was when the masks fell. With cases rapidly falling after the Omicron peak, blue state governors began announcing the end to their state mask mandates, while the CDC held to its blanket school masking recommendations. At the end of February—four days before Biden’s first state of the union address—the CDC changed its blanket guidance to one based on local case rates and hospital capacity.
Overnight, the CDC’s new, data-backed guidance shifted masking recommendations from 100 percent of students to 37 percent.
The drop in district mask mandates was nearly as sharp. Across six weeks, the percentage of students under mask mandates fell from 52 to five percent. During that time, eleven states dropped their mask mandates, and districts responded quickly. The vast majority of districts in those states went mask optional immediately, or days after governors gave them the choice.
The CDC’s new guidance, which is still in place, is based on local COVID case rates and hospital capacity, metrics that were available over the course of the school year. That raises the question: How would CDC’s masking recommendations have looked had the current data-based guidance been in place all year? Using the CDC’s own data, I took their current guidance and applied it retrospectively to the 2021-22 school year. The results were startling on two fronts.
The first is how many students could have been mask optional last fall. For ten weeks from early October to mid-December, CDC’s current framework would have recommended districts mandate masks for just 38 percent of students, when its actual guidance recommended 100 percent school masking.
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Second, district masking policies did not match the COVID threat as the CDC currently measures it. Before February, an average of 52 percent of all K-12 public school students attended districts whose mask policies did not match the local pandemic threat. This mismatch was evenly split between masked districts that did not need to be and mask optional districts that should have masked. Using the CDC’s current metrics of local COVID threats, the appropriateness of district policies might as well have been decided by the flip of a coin.
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The 2021-22 flashpoint of school masking has lessons for this fall, and not all of them are good. Many district in red areas refused to mask even at the pandemic’s height last year, and may now look good for being recklessly unresponsive. Many districts in blue areas masked students far longer than needed, and in doing so increased pandemic fatigue that makes masking harder in future pandemic surges. Those lessons will likely bleed into the upcoming school year. If the COVID threat remains low, this may be a non-issue. But COVID has proven resilient, and if it resurges as it has time and again, the CDC’s guidance may be guiding fewer districts than ever. Even where masking might be needed to contain the pandemic threat, the CDC may regret having taught districts to ignore its own masking guidance.
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