Don’t Mandate Kids in Masks

I ’ve searched in vain for a reasonable explanation for the recommendation to mask children going back to school this fall. I suspect there is none.

One theoretical justification for continuing to mask children is the belief that someday, probably, there will be a juvenile vaccine against COVID-19, and therefore children could be safer than they are now. So let’s just keep doing this until then. What’s the big deal?

But this is to judge the risk to children on a relative scale that is hypothetical and self-referential, rather than honestly connecting their risk to the facts of the real world. It ignores that on a population level, children are already very safe from COVID, or at least as safe as we expect most others to be.

Unvaccinated children have a lower risk of death or serious outcome from COVID-19 than vaccinated people in their 30s do.

We also have to rate COVID’s danger to children against other dangers. In the United States, extraordinarily tiny fractions of children have died among the millions who have gotten sick. It’s true that this is not zero risk. But even these numbers may be serious exaggerations. The CDC hasn’t investigated whether COVID was the cause or incidental to those deaths. Of the number who have been hospitalized, again, there is no investigation whether these children were hospitalized for or just with COVID. A Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report looking at the CDC’s data estimates that up to 45.7 percent of these minors “were hospitalized for reasons that might not have been primarily related to COVID-19.” And even if we accept those numbers, they do not necessitate universal restrictive behaviors. For perspective, of children twelve years and younger, 636 died in car accidents in 2018. We do not treat this number as an emergency requiring us to upend the entire nation. Theoretically these also are preventable deaths, but trying to stop them all would require rules and enforcement mechanisms too invasive on the entire society.

Another theory is that children are a potential reservoir for the development of variants. But if COVID-19 is going endemic, then variants are going to be produced around the planet for years and possibly decades, and this process cannot be meaningfully altered by cloth masks on children in the United States.

We have to consider the possibility that as in many historical pandemics, people, even experts, are falling prey to an ancient superstition that other people’s children are especially toxic or dangerous. This belief is rooted in the somewhat reasonable experience that children are less socially responsible, less responsive to social stigma on their behavior, and generally less hygienic.

But the details of COVID-19 show us that healthy kids are not getting seriously ill from COVID and are not the cause of serious spread. Schools, despite being precisely the kind of environment in which adults transmit, were found to have one-third the rate of transmission that existed in their local communities last year.

Finally, there is the truly idiotic belief that we need to mask children because some number of adults aren’t vaccinated. The problem is that there’s no logical or medical connection between these events. Remember, unvaccinated children are in less danger during this pandemic than vaccinated adults. Unvaccinated adults have decided to take their risks, and the risks to them are not primarily from children. Imposing a medically dubious or counterproductive measure on children is not going to stir up new and morally uplifting anger at the unvaccinated, only at the cruel regulators.

Proponents of masking say that it’s just a mask, so even if it’s a minor inconvenience, it could still be worth doing.  But the primary argument against masking children is a strong one: It is unjust and psychologically destabilizing to make them live as if they are in danger when they are not in danger. A significant number of schoolchildren are too young to understand that life is full of bullsh** that you just put up with. Even many adults have trouble understanding probabilities more complex than “will/won’t or probably not.” When told they must take an extraordinary precaution, many young children still operate from a naïve view of the integrity of authority figures, and they conclude innocently that they are in extraordinary danger.

Besides the normal social and learning problems that come from this kind of masking, a young child who is being told to mask up at school to avoid a deadly disease is being habituated to view her school, and the world around her, as more perilous than it is. That child is being habituated to viewing her parents as ejecting her from the safety of the home into something that is a threat to her.

If the children we are talking about are older, and sophisticated enough to realize they are safer in a room with COVID than in a car with a teenage driver, then we are habituating them to compliance with lies and to a life of cynical impotence in the face of insane authority.

Noble lies don’t make a school safe; they make schooling itself corrupt and corruptive.