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https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-06-05/study-finds-that-removing-school-mask-mandates-contributed-to-22-000-u-s-covid-deaths-in-just-one-year>
"Someday we Americans may stop quarreling over our response to the COVID-19
pandemic — lockdown orders, social distancing and so forth — but one category
of debate may never become immune to second-guessing.
That’s the impact of anti-pandemic measures on schools and schoolchildren.
According to popular opinion, these were almost entirely mistaken or
ineffective.
A newly published study from data scientists at Michigan State University
knocks one pillar out from under this claim. It finds that the abrupt removal
in 2022 of mandates that children wear masks in school contributed to an
estimated 21,800 COVID deaths that year — a shocking 9% of the total COVID
deaths in the U.S. that year.
“We were surprised by that too,” says Scott A. Imberman, a professor of
economics and education policy at Michigan State and a co-author of the paper.
On reflection, he says, given the mixing of children and staff in the close
quarters of a classroom, “it’s pretty easy to see how COVID could propagate to
the wider community.”
In February 2022, about 50% of public school children, or more than 20 million
pupils, were in districts with mask mandates; then, over a period of six weeks,
almost all those districts rescinded their mandates. “You can see how that
would create a pretty substantial surge in infections.”
Most of the surge, Imberman told me, was a “spillover effect” in the
communities outside the schools themselves.
The Michigan State finding undermines several myths and misrepresentations
about COVID spread by the right wing. These include the claim that children are
virtually impervious to COVID, which has been refuted by the injury and death
toll among children.
A related misrepresentation was that children can’t pass on the infection to
adults. In fact, because many children didn’t show symptoms of the infection or
had only mild, flu-like symptoms, they functioned almost like an undetected
fifth column in spreading the virus to adults."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
