20 ms·

Pediatric COVID19 Cases in Counties with and Without School Mask Requirements

37 points by colpabar 4y ago

sprague 4y ago
Key conclusion: "observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables." Surprisingly few interventions are so good that you don't need fancy statistics to justify them. Really good treatments (e.g. antibiotics) are so effective as to be obvious to all.
- colpabar 4y ago
  > Surprisingly few interventions are so good that you don't need fancy statistics to justify them To me the real story is that the CDC, which is supposed to be the public health authority in the US, decided not to use said "fancy statistics" and instead chose to only include data that supported their policies. It's the CDC, they should have access to tons of data. Why such small sample sizes?
- belltaco 4y ago
  >Surprisingly few interventions are so good that you don't need fancy statistics to justify them. Really good treatments (e.g. antibiotics) are so effective as to be obvious to all You mean like the HCQ cures covid research and studeis in March 2020 that "showed" a 100% cure rate that was pushed hard by Elon Musk and an entire political wing? And so many people still believe it, even on HN, it's crazy.
  - colpabar 4y ago
    Are any of those people in this thread?
anovikov 4y ago
It looks almost too stupid to believe they really assumed pediatric cases will be different. Vast majority of covid cases among kids are asymptomatic and never detected, masking for kids is not about protecting them, it's about protecting their parents and especially grandparents from the covid infection they could bring from school.
- rllearneratwork 4y ago
  can't parents and grandparents, you know, get vaccinated to protect themselves?
  - WalterGR 4y ago
    Undoubtedly they did if they could. Vaccines are not 100% effective. Why are we still talking about this? "At Least Two Million Children Have Lost a Parent or Grandparent Caregiver to COVID" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/at-least-two-million-children-have-lost-a-parent-or-grandparent-caregiver-to-covid/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/at-least-two-mill...
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > can't parents and grandparents, you know, get vaccinated to protect themselves? Not necessarily. Immunocompromise, have you heard of it?
    - thehappypm 4y ago
      I would pay an increase in taxes to pay the immunocompromised to stay home. I’m so sick of people bringing this up as if it’s a justification for us to wear masks forever
      - WalterGR 4y ago
        Who is forcing you to wear a mask forever? That kind of hyperbole serves no one.
        thehappypm 4y ago
        My town (Massachusetts) just reinstated an indoor mask mandate, so… where’s the hyperbole? We’re going to have these covid spikes forever
        4y ago
encoderer 4y ago
So the masks don’t keep the children more healthy, and it’s entirely possible they hurt language development and classroom engagement. Sorry, kids.
- tonguez 4y ago
  its probably part of a pipeline to make a reliably isolated and scared voting base that will always vote to give big brother more power because they don’t know how to socialize so they are more susceptible to propaganda
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > its probably part of a pipeline to make a reliably isolated and scared voting base that will always vote to give big brother more power because they don’t know how to socialize so they are more susceptible to propagand No. 1. You're describing a deliberate conspiracy, but providing zero evidence for it. It's not enough to show that the policy will lead to the results you allege (which I do not grant you), but that the policy was deliberately chosen for that reason and not another. 2. From what I've read, the actual result of masking and COVID has been increased behavior problems and acting out in students, not increased compliance.
  - IE6 4y ago
    I still wear a mask today - specifically when I am going to encounter a lot of people at once (like ordering food at a cafeteria), interacting with someone who through their job has to come face to face with hundreds of people a day (like a barista), or just passing through a shared area (like walking from the cafeteria to my desk with my food). Other than that I take the mask off if I am sitting relatively by myself. I am still waiting to feel this fear that the right wing media has hammered into people's heads as a legitimate talking point. I think there are at least two comments here already citing this fear. I don't feel afraid when I have the mask on or when my mask is off and wearing a mask does not change any of my other behavior. What was scary was in 2020 when I went to the ER with COVID. That was actually scary.
- EricE 4y ago
legitster 4y ago
I don't understand why people would have believed otherwise in the first place. It's clear that masks are effective at preventing transmission for passing encounters. But I have operated under the assumption that if you are sharing space with someone for 8 hours a day - you're basically still going to spread Covid.
7174n6 4y ago
I'm not a scientist or a doctor but it seems that forcing kids to mask for 6 hours a day is useless when they leave school and go to sporting events, movie theaters, restaurants, shopping malls, and even their classmates homes, all without a mask. Does Covid only spread in a classroom? And protecting the teachers and staff isn't a justified reason either because the vast majority of them are removing the masks when they leave the school also. It just doesn't seem logical to me.
- WalterGR 4y ago
  Are children of immunocompromised caregivers doing all of those activities? Unlikely, since it could kill said caregivers. > And protecting the teachers and staff isn't a justified reason either because the vast majority of them are removing the masks when they leave the school also. That implies they’re removing their masks and being unsafe. Citation needed.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
From the study: > School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways. From my purely anecdotal observations, regions with higher rates of COVID are more likely to adopt masking requirements as a countermeasure. That correlation alone would explain why the benefits of masking become unclear when measured on a large scale.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  And indeed, when controlling for infection rate at week 0, mask effectiveness suddenly becomes clear in the data again. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4118566#comment-5870932122 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4118566#...
  - anamax 4y ago
    Your link points to an argument for mask INeffectiveness. There is a comment that there's another way to look at the data that might show mask effectiveness, but the relevant analysis wasn't done.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Yeah, it's kind of weird to do this kind of analysis when you have data that you include on a chart which clearly demonstrate the variable by which the groups you are concerned with are systematically different that you need to control for, and not include that among your controls, and then have a conclusion that is basically “research is hard, these groups must be systematically different in some way we haven't controlled for, but who knows what it might be”. Places that adopted mask mandates had higher baseline pediatric infection rates which were erased within six weeks.
scythe 4y ago
A large part of this study consists of a review of data from a prior study. That study is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8486393/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8486393/ It may be helpful to read them both together. As the authors emphasize, the statistical analysis of these phenomena is quite difficult, but one thing that stuck out to me: there is practically no correlation with population density, before or after controlling for the community vulnerability index.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I suspect, to the degree we ever actually know, that a lot of seemingly sensible interventions and behaviors may have made some difference at the margins--and if people had done nothing outcomes would almost certainly have been worse. But vaccinations and improved treatments aside, it seems fairly clear there weren't silver bullets.
erickhill 4y ago
Yes, masking works in degrees. It's not hard to understand that. Where schools break down, however, is during lunchtime. Kids - like adults - drop their masks to eat and drink (of course) and carry on as if there is something magical about holding a sandwich in front of their faces. After 30 minutes of much needed socializing, the masks go back on. To be clear, at my both of my kids' schools in Seattle masks are 100% voluntary, yet there is a culture to wear them (even on the sidewalks while walking home from school - not joking). It's not like the masked schools are 100% solid, no, so the tests are wobbly to say the least. Yet, my kids don't sit next to every student in the school during lunch, so their exposure is also teeny tiny. But we're anecdotally seeing cases rise at work and school here in Seattle over the past 3 weeks unlike any time I can remember during the past 2 years. Every area is different... It used to be, "Do you know anyone who has caught it?" And now I know several. I sometimes think the UK has it right. People there have simply accepted it and deal. They have a big spike every 2 months but carry on with packed pubs, covid be damned.
- azinman2 4y ago
  > They have a big spike every 2 months but carry on with packed pubs, covid be damned. And with that come consequences. It’s all trade offs.
  - EricE 4y ago
    What consequences? Ones that aren't near as bad as the economic and sociological destruction that the lockdowns brought? What's really disgusting is the health "leadership" have shot their wad overplaying COVID. God help us if there ever is a contagion worthy of all the fuss because half the people are going to extend a middle finger no matter how valid. And it's not their fault for feeling that way either. Credibility - incredibly hard to earn, very easy to piss away. Once pissed away on frivolous shit, it's even harder to earn back.
    - azinman2 4y ago
      Millions have died, many have long Covid causing difficulty with cognition and a host of other conditions.
ManBlanket 4y ago
Studies like this will only be compounded by those attempting to quantify how harmful removing an entire nation's children from school for almost 2 years, to socially isolate them from their community while mongering fear of other people fared against their psychological well being. How many hacker news users were aggressively throwing shade at anyone who deign so much as offer an iota of dissent against the status quo's reaction to mandates? Funny how a dubious analog to shoving your head in the sand became a conduit of intolerance for people with beliefs that differ from our own. I was shocked how quickly everyone glommed onto a narrative so easily appropriated by special groups with direct conflicts of economic interests, while aggressively shaming anyone who stepped out of line to point that out or ask whether one policy or another was effective, or harmful. I have read about a lot of dumb things humanity has done throughout history, but our reaction to covid is probably the dumbest I'm likely to see in my lifetime. More studies like this to come, rest assured.
weberer 4y ago
>The Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. have released multiple observational studies suggesting that school mask mandates significantly reduce case rates. >however, incorporating a larger sample and longer period showed no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates. >Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables. Randomized studies can more reliably inform public health policy. I think the big story here is that the CDC is promoting bad science, while being treated as the gold standard by "fact checkers".
mmastrac 4y ago
Perhaps this is a condemnation of how poor indoor air quality is in most schools (and office spaces) more than anything. While there are plenty of studies showing efficacy of masks in indoor environments, we're barely recirculating air in indoor spaces to the point where CO2 levels become a major problem for cognition. The combination of proper ventilation and air exchange plus masks should be the real winner for prevention of spread.
nikolay 4y ago
We people are stupid and keep repeating the same mistakes! Didn't we make billions of people obese because we put all fats in one bucket? Now, we're repeating the same mistakes with "masks"! A filthy soggy cloth breeding germs and not preventing any infection is a "mask" just like a kids' KF94/KN95 one!!! Even if it's certified mask - if it's not worn by the specs, it does extraordinarily little!
Markoff 4y ago
there was even better study published recently about how significant part of "long COVID" patients have various mental issues similar to people you works previously call hypochondriacs "Increased risk for PASC (long COVID) was noted in women and those with a history of anxiety disorder." https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905

37 points by colpabar 4y ago

Key conclusion: "observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables." Surprisingly few interventions are so good that you don't need fancy statistics to justify them. Really good treatments (e.g. antibiotics) are so effective as to be obvious to all.

colpabar 4y ago
> Surprisingly few interventions are so good that you don't need fancy statistics to justify them To me the real story is that the CDC, which is supposed to be the public health authority in the US, decided not to use said "fancy statistics" and instead chose to only include data that supported their policies. It's the CDC, they should have access to tons of data. Why such small sample sizes?
belltaco 4y ago
>Surprisingly few interventions are so good that you don't need fancy statistics to justify them. Really good treatments (e.g. antibiotics) are so effective as to be obvious to all You mean like the HCQ cures covid research and studeis in March 2020 that "showed" a 100% cure rate that was pushed hard by Elon Musk and an entire political wing? And so many people still believe it, even on HN, it's crazy.
- colpabar 4y ago
  Are any of those people in this thread?

anovikov 4y ago

It looks almost too stupid to believe they really assumed pediatric cases will be different. Vast majority of covid cases among kids are asymptomatic and never detected, masking for kids is not about protecting them, it's about protecting their parents and especially grandparents from the covid infection they could bring from school.

rllearneratwork 4y ago
can't parents and grandparents, you know, get vaccinated to protect themselves?
- WalterGR 4y ago
  Undoubtedly they did if they could. Vaccines are not 100% effective. Why are we still talking about this? "At Least Two Million Children Have Lost a Parent or Grandparent Caregiver to COVID" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/at-least-two-million-children-have-lost-a-parent-or-grandparent-caregiver-to-covid/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/at-least-two-mill...
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > can't parents and grandparents, you know, get vaccinated to protect themselves? Not necessarily. Immunocompromise, have you heard of it?
  - thehappypm 4y ago
    I would pay an increase in taxes to pay the immunocompromised to stay home. I’m so sick of people bringing this up as if it’s a justification for us to wear masks forever
    - WalterGR 4y ago
      Who is forcing you to wear a mask forever? That kind of hyperbole serves no one.
      - thehappypm 4y ago
        My town (Massachusetts) just reinstated an indoor mask mandate, so… where’s the hyperbole? We’re going to have these covid spikes forever
        4y ago

encoderer 4y ago

So the masks don’t keep the children more healthy, and it’s entirely possible they hurt language development and classroom engagement. Sorry, kids.

tonguez 4y ago
its probably part of a pipeline to make a reliably isolated and scared voting base that will always vote to give big brother more power because they don’t know how to socialize so they are more susceptible to propaganda
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > its probably part of a pipeline to make a reliably isolated and scared voting base that will always vote to give big brother more power because they don’t know how to socialize so they are more susceptible to propagand No. 1. You're describing a deliberate conspiracy, but providing zero evidence for it. It's not enough to show that the policy will lead to the results you allege (which I do not grant you), but that the policy was deliberately chosen for that reason and not another. 2. From what I've read, the actual result of masking and COVID has been increased behavior problems and acting out in students, not increased compliance.
- IE6 4y ago
  I still wear a mask today - specifically when I am going to encounter a lot of people at once (like ordering food at a cafeteria), interacting with someone who through their job has to come face to face with hundreds of people a day (like a barista), or just passing through a shared area (like walking from the cafeteria to my desk with my food). Other than that I take the mask off if I am sitting relatively by myself. I am still waiting to feel this fear that the right wing media has hammered into people's heads as a legitimate talking point. I think there are at least two comments here already citing this fear. I don't feel afraid when I have the mask on or when my mask is off and wearing a mask does not change any of my other behavior. What was scary was in 2020 when I went to the ER with COVID. That was actually scary.
EricE 4y ago

legitster 4y ago

I don't understand why people would have believed otherwise in the first place. It's clear that masks are effective at preventing transmission for passing encounters. But I have operated under the assumption that if you are sharing space with someone for 8 hours a day - you're basically still going to spread Covid.

7174n6 4y ago

I'm not a scientist or a doctor but it seems that forcing kids to mask for 6 hours a day is useless when they leave school and go to sporting events, movie theaters, restaurants, shopping malls, and even their classmates homes, all without a mask. Does Covid only spread in a classroom? And protecting the teachers and staff isn't a justified reason either because the vast majority of them are removing the masks when they leave the school also. It just doesn't seem logical to me.

WalterGR 4y ago
Are children of immunocompromised caregivers doing all of those activities? Unlikely, since it could kill said caregivers. > And protecting the teachers and staff isn't a justified reason either because the vast majority of them are removing the masks when they leave the school also. That implies they’re removing their masks and being unsafe. Citation needed.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

From the study: > School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways. From my purely anecdotal observations, regions with higher rates of COVID are more likely to adopt masking requirements as a countermeasure. That correlation alone would explain why the benefits of masking become unclear when measured on a large scale.

lern_too_spel 4y ago
And indeed, when controlling for infection rate at week 0, mask effectiveness suddenly becomes clear in the data again. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4118566#comment-5870932122 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4118566#...
- anamax 4y ago
  Your link points to an argument for mask INeffectiveness. There is a comment that there's another way to look at the data that might show mask effectiveness, but the relevant analysis wasn't done.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Yeah, it's kind of weird to do this kind of analysis when you have data that you include on a chart which clearly demonstrate the variable by which the groups you are concerned with are systematically different that you need to control for, and not include that among your controls, and then have a conclusion that is basically “research is hard, these groups must be systematically different in some way we haven't controlled for, but who knows what it might be”. Places that adopted mask mandates had higher baseline pediatric infection rates which were erased within six weeks.

scythe 4y ago

A large part of this study consists of a review of data from a prior study. That study is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8486393/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8486393/ It may be helpful to read them both together. As the authors emphasize, the statistical analysis of these phenomena is quite difficult, but one thing that stuck out to me: there is practically no correlation with population density, before or after controlling for the community vulnerability index.

ghaff 4y ago
I suspect, to the degree we ever actually know, that a lot of seemingly sensible interventions and behaviors may have made some difference at the margins--and if people had done nothing outcomes would almost certainly have been worse. But vaccinations and improved treatments aside, it seems fairly clear there weren't silver bullets.

erickhill 4y ago

Yes, masking works in degrees. It's not hard to understand that. Where schools break down, however, is during lunchtime. Kids - like adults - drop their masks to eat and drink (of course) and carry on as if there is something magical about holding a sandwich in front of their faces. After 30 minutes of much needed socializing, the masks go back on. To be clear, at my both of my kids' schools in Seattle masks are 100% voluntary, yet there is a culture to wear them (even on the sidewalks while walking home from school - not joking). It's not like the masked schools are 100% solid, no, so the tests are wobbly to say the least. Yet, my kids don't sit next to every student in the school during lunch, so their exposure is also teeny tiny. But we're anecdotally seeing cases rise at work and school here in Seattle over the past 3 weeks unlike any time I can remember during the past 2 years. Every area is different... It used to be, "Do you know anyone who has caught it?" And now I know several. I sometimes think the UK has it right. People there have simply accepted it and deal. They have a big spike every 2 months but carry on with packed pubs, covid be damned.

azinman2 4y ago
> They have a big spike every 2 months but carry on with packed pubs, covid be damned. And with that come consequences. It’s all trade offs.
- EricE 4y ago
  What consequences? Ones that aren't near as bad as the economic and sociological destruction that the lockdowns brought? What's really disgusting is the health "leadership" have shot their wad overplaying COVID. God help us if there ever is a contagion worthy of all the fuss because half the people are going to extend a middle finger no matter how valid. And it's not their fault for feeling that way either. Credibility - incredibly hard to earn, very easy to piss away. Once pissed away on frivolous shit, it's even harder to earn back.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    Millions have died, many have long Covid causing difficulty with cognition and a host of other conditions.

ManBlanket 4y ago

Studies like this will only be compounded by those attempting to quantify how harmful removing an entire nation's children from school for almost 2 years, to socially isolate them from their community while mongering fear of other people fared against their psychological well being. How many hacker news users were aggressively throwing shade at anyone who deign so much as offer an iota of dissent against the status quo's reaction to mandates? Funny how a dubious analog to shoving your head in the sand became a conduit of intolerance for people with beliefs that differ from our own. I was shocked how quickly everyone glommed onto a narrative so easily appropriated by special groups with direct conflicts of economic interests, while aggressively shaming anyone who stepped out of line to point that out or ask whether one policy or another was effective, or harmful. I have read about a lot of dumb things humanity has done throughout history, but our reaction to covid is probably the dumbest I'm likely to see in my lifetime. More studies like this to come, rest assured.

weberer 4y ago

>The Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. have released multiple observational studies suggesting that school mask mandates significantly reduce case rates. >however, incorporating a larger sample and longer period showed no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates. >Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables. Randomized studies can more reliably inform public health policy. I think the big story here is that the CDC is promoting bad science, while being treated as the gold standard by "fact checkers".

mmastrac 4y ago

Perhaps this is a condemnation of how poor indoor air quality is in most schools (and office spaces) more than anything. While there are plenty of studies showing efficacy of masks in indoor environments, we're barely recirculating air in indoor spaces to the point where CO2 levels become a major problem for cognition. The combination of proper ventilation and air exchange plus masks should be the real winner for prevention of spread.

nikolay 4y ago

We people are stupid and keep repeating the same mistakes! Didn't we make billions of people obese because we put all fats in one bucket? Now, we're repeating the same mistakes with "masks"! A filthy soggy cloth breeding germs and not preventing any infection is a "mask" just like a kids' KF94/KN95 one!!! Even if it's certified mask - if it's not worn by the specs, it does extraordinarily little!

Markoff 4y ago

there was even better study published recently about how significant part of "long COVID" patients have various mental issues similar to people you works previously call hypochondriacs "Increased risk for PASC (long COVID) was noted in women and those with a history of anxiety disorder." https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905