Fundamentally the issue is that teachers and teaching in general is too sensitive to disruptions. Unlike most other professions, teaching has the cascading effect of making the parents who have jobs also unavailable and so forth
For you computer people out there it’s a familiar problem. This teacher was sick, and she should’ve been removed. Are there substitutes available? Is there another teacher? If not then teaching simply stops for that class, this is not politically realistic nor is it necessarily advisable.
If nothing else this shows that are society needs a little bit more redundancy. That way the solution is simple - check for symptoms upon entrance and send sick people home. The end
That being said it’s baffling that the teacher took their mask off despite having symptoms. Surely that would’ve helped a little
We have a teacher that is positive, infectious and is spending hours in a classroom even after exhibiting symptoms. Now that needs to be avoided in the future. Fix that first and foremost.
Where is the evidence that her wearing a mask would have changed the outcomes? The students did wear a mask after all. It either works or it does not. Bringing masking into the picture has the opposite effect - it creates the illusion that it would be fine to show up with symptoms if you have a mask.
Then simulations are bullshit ... you can simulate to generate any and every outcome you want - it all depends on the parameters. Sorry, does not take much to see that, just simply look at everyday observations.
There are plenty of schools with no masking requirement - yet NONE have exhibited anything close to the 91% infection rates (within 30 days!) that the CDC simulations predict.
You do realize that, in medicine, things "work" on a spectrum right? A pill might be x% effective at alleviating certain systems in particular cases, etc. Why shouldn't the case be the same for masks? There are far more variables than "bool masked = true". What kind of mask material was worn? Was it a well-fitted mask? Was it a particulate filter mask or a simple one? Was the infected person masked? The non-infected? Etc.
the point I was making is that the story, at least in my reading, is being presented primarily as scientific evidence on the effectiveness of masks in school.
Especially the WaPo article. If 50% of students in a classroom get infected after 2 days in school while wearing masks then, IMHO, masks can't be all that effective in the first place.
the whole article tries to suggest that the infections happened during that period she removed the mask ... there is no evidence for that whatsoever
You’re right to question that. From my understanding, she was masked except for the story reading. Teachers need to use facial expression to convey what they’re reading, not just for those with disabilities, hearing problems, etc… but for all children. People who take this as a fable about mask wearing know nothing about pedagogy. It’s a cautionary tale about the need for testing. It also serves to contextualize the precarious trade offs facing our educators and educational system. There are no easy answers; though more testing and vaccinations for the more at risk are obvious takeaways.
> If 50% of students in a classroom get infected after 2 days in school while wearing masks then, IMHO, masks can't be all that effective in the first place.
I believe the primary assertion has always been that making protects others more than it protects oneself. So I wouldn't consider this a contradiction of that. That said, it's entirely possible that the 50% of students who didn't get infected were wearing superior masks. Or, perhaps 80% of the students would have been infected if no one had worn masks.
In short, you can't really draw a meaningful "see masks don't work" conclusion from this.
yes, you are correct to note there is a difference between the confidence of the narrative and what science acftually says you can strongly conclude in a situation like this.
This is common in journalism and it's our job to call out statements like these when they are not truly supportable by evidence.
>Where is the evidence that her wearing a mask would have changed the outcomes?
There is multiple studies that show masks are effective at _slowing down_ the spread.
>It either works or it does not.
Huh? This is like saying, "chemotherapy works or it does not."
>Sorry, does not take much to see that, just simply look at everyday observations.
Yep. I'm looking. There's mass deaths a day. Funny the activity is in the anti-mask states, huh?
>yet NONE have exhibited anything close to the 91% infection rates
The CDC said 91% of kids live in high risk places... it has nothing to do with the infection rate. You need to _read_ sources and not just emotionally react.
> There's mass deaths a day. Funny the activity is in the anti-mask states, huh?
I suggest you look at the actual data - no such correlation exists.
The majority of US states have similar death rates per population at around 2K deaths per 1M citizens. (with a spread of around +/- 15%) You can find examples for each,
Death rates correlate much better to wealth and way of living than local policies.
> The majority of US states have similar death rates per population at around 2K deaths per 1M citizens. (with a spread of around +/- 15%)
The range is actually about 40 to 300 per 100K (or 400 to 3000 per million), but what the upthread claim seems to be about is the recent death rate, not the total death rate. No one I can find reports that per capita, but I suspect it has even more variation (California is about middle of the road for total deaths, but was an early leader with its population centers hit really hard at the beginning of the pandemic, while a number of the places in the South that weren't hit hard initially have gotten up near the top in total deaths per capita.)
There are lots of models, but the only study I’m aware of showed that blue surgical masks had ≈10% efficacy when worn correctly, with cloth masks and gaiters less effective.
Additional ventilation seemed to have better efficacy.
The chart I saw showed that masks are somewhat effective for ingress and somewhat effective for egress contamination. When both parties are wearing the mask, and are social distancing, etc, the effectiveness goes up considerably.
The only singular control that works in a vacuum is a vacuum. So unless you are working in a vacuum, you need to stack controls in your favour. Just like you do in every other situation in life.
I've only ever seen them saying problems with school environments amount to a lack of good air circulation with people breathing the same air in and out amongst themselves for hours at a time. That's exactly what the CDC and everyone else has said to avoid doing, and why the phone apps rate 15 minutes of close proximity as enough exposure to warrant a test.
Just like with rubbing alcohol, time and amount have to be taken into account. Water will put out nearly any household fire. But only if other controls accompany it, and there is enough of that water for enough time to have the desired effect.
She took her mask off to read. They were all in that contaminated environment for most of the day. There is every reason to expect infections in such an environment.
The problem is lack of testing and slowness testing. The US I hate to say it, has been shameful in this regard compared to other developed nations. Teachers need to get tested and get results, quickly. That’s just not happening in the US. This case is the inevitable result of that lack of testing. Have you tried to get tested? I have and had to give up and go buy a test at CVS. It cost me 40 dollars and I was lucky they had tests on the shelf and I had time in my busy schedule to do it. Teachers probably have less time, less money, and may think they don’t need a test if they’ve been vaccinated.
Masks help infected people not spread COVID, they are less useful at preventing uninfected from catching COVID. Everyone has to wear them though because no one knows who has COVID at any given time.
alas, evidence to that efficacy of masks is severely lacking
tell me, why is that 16 months into this pandemic there are no definitive studies to measure the actual effect of masks, you know one with a control and masked people? Yet it is the easiest thing to measure ever.
We can test an actual life saving vaccine (that also carries huge risks while under development) with 40K volunteers but the mask seems to elude the scrutiny.
The CDC should just do the fracking study and put this issue to rest already. Strangely they are not.
I made this case a couple of weeks ago, and in response to the conversation I set out to do another literature review (which I hadn't done in about a year, and at that time data were sorely lacking).
I was happily surprised to find that several reasonably applicable studies have been published in the meantime, and seem to universally support a statistically significant reduction in infections.
If you're basing your statements on literature review from ~9 months ago, I suggest that you look again, the top results on PubMed were extremely easy to find and virtually all had free public access.
Of the top of my head, relative risk reduction with vs without masks varied between 30-70% depending on the study, with absolute risk reduction more like 10% (with the absolute risk being fairly low to begin with).
I'd be eager to see a proper study (with control groups) and it would go a long way to convince me.
All I have seen so far are studies that relate to case numbers going one way or another when a policy was made or not. Simulations, behaviors etc. Sorry that is just not convincing. Case numbers vary a lot with or without measures. In my opinion when you require masks people don't do certain things as often ... does that mean that the mask protected you?
You are sending me to search PubMed, instead of linking to a paper that operated with a randomized controlled trial. That is the typical answer one gets when asks for an RCT on masks.
The question is: are you actually qualified to judge wwhat is a "proper" study? Like, trained in reading biological study literature (it's not straightforward) or able to identify flaws in trial design?
I understand the concern and is valid - it is like the No True Scotsman fallacy ... is there a "proper study".
yet all I am asking is there an RCT study on masks where they measured actual infection rates on a subpopulation randomly assigned to wear a mask? It is not a particularly unusual design, it is regularly done for vaccines and drugs. Measuring the actual effect on the people that are assigned to each group.
I believe that there is no RCT that would indicate that masks work. I have never seen one. As I said I'd be eager to read it if there was a study like that.
For example the Cohrane review on masks analyzed many studies, none indicated that masks work:
> Compared with wearing no mask, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness (9 studies; 3507 people); and probably makes no difference in how many people have flu confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 3005 people).
Yet all of a sudden CDC claims masks are super effective.
Let me put my question another way. From what you're writing (I read multiple comments of yours in this post) it doesn't look like you're qualified to judge a paper on its merits. So I have to ask why you're asking for "a proper study", if you're not qualified to judge the study?
I am qualified to judge a scientific paper, but I don't think this should be a personal judgement call of who the "better expert" is. I am trying to avoid calling to authority when deciding an objective truth.
On this topic a reasonably intelligent person reading a reasonably well written scientific paper can understand its strengths and weaknesses. It is not that complicated, we would be talking about simple counts: X people were enrolled, Y people got infected with masks Z people infected without masks. Yes there is statistics involved, there are corrections to be made, proper tests to be chosen, but at end we are talking about a few integer numbers and their relationships. We are not discussing the unsolved mysteries of quantum chromodynamics.
If you look at the information for multiple vaccine papers the data is detailed, granular, compelling and evident - even though I could not design or perform the same analysis myself. There is no debate there that it works.
Yet there is no similarity in the data robustness or even availability when it comes to effectiveness of masks.
I believe that there are no RCT studies on masks that would support their benefits. The Cohran review that I linked on the state of the field also comes to the same conclusion.
We just assume that masks work and therefore leaving a control group unmasked is unethical. It is the same with the vaccines. The trials have technically not finished yet, but the control groups have long been vaccinated. The real control groups now are the much maligned vaccine hesitant.
The title and narrative of this article is an egregious misreporting of the CDC report, and was obviously crafted to be divisive click bait.
Pinning this exclusively on the unvaccinated teacher is unfair and not supported by any hard facts from the CDC's investigation and findings [1].
1) Causation was not established. The delta variant was likely circulating throughout the entire school. For example, kids across multiple grade levels tested positive (these kids are not in the same classrooms). Also parents and siblings tested positive. It's extremely plausible that the teacher was not the 'index' case, even considering symptom onset dates (many infections are asymptomatic especially in children). Most importantly, since the students were only tested after the teacher tested positive, the test results cannot determine who was the true index case.
2) All 3 vaccinated adults were symptomatic, which speaks to the fact that although the vaccines are still effective at preventing severe outcomes, the delta variant has undermined vaccine efficacy at preventing infection (decreasing from 91% to 66%) [2].
> Among the five infected adults, one parent and the teacher were unvaccinated; the others were fully vaccinated. The vaccinated adults and one unvaccinated adult were symptomatic
3) This teacher should not have been at work if she had symptoms, which is partly a reflection of school policies and the lacking benefits of many elementary school teachers in general (eg limited paid time off).
For what it's worth, the Guardian says "Infections corresponded to the classroom’s seating chart, with the students sitting closest to the teacher the most likely to be infected." CNN supplies a little more information.
"In the classroom of 22 students, 12 became infected -- including eight out of 10 students in the two front rows."
Yes this information is in the CDC report, take a look at the seating chart with annotated infection and symptom status [1].
> 12 became infected
Using the word became is disingenuous at best (and misinformation at worst) because it implies that causation was established, but it was not. Here is the exact language from the CDC report:
> Students were seated in five rows; the attack rate in the two rows seated closest to the teacher’s desk was 80% (eight of 10) and was 28% (four of 14) in the three back rows (Fisher’s exact test; p = 0.036)
Because the students were only tested after the teacher tested positive, there is no way to determine causation from positive test results.
Even the evidence from genome sequencing could only establish correlation, but not causation.
> Eleven sequences were genetically indistinguishable from one another [...] Among the indistinguishable specimens, six were from students of the index patient, four were from students in the separate grade, and one was from a sibling of a student in the index patient’s class, suggesting that infections occurring in the two grades likely were part of the same outbreak.
Covid is endemic. Pretty much all of us are going to get it sooner or later.
If you are vaccinated, you will likely fight it off, and likely not even know it. Or, you may have mild symptoms. Only in rare cases will you get serious illness.
Ditto if you are a child, as covid goes after the ACE2 receptor that is activated at puberty, so children are at very slight risk.
As of today, there have been 385 covid "involved" (not same as caused) deaths in the US since the start of the pandemic that are for ages 0 - 17.
Nitpick: 0-17 data conflates infant morality with children mortality. 30k of the 54k deaths are in the 0-1 age group.
Alternate: For 5-14 age group, there have been 131 covid 'involved' deaths out of 9,038 total deaths, and unclear what the co-morbidities were. No reason to get concerned, no reason to mandate vaccines / masks for kids.
The links above are not an argument against vaccination. They are an argument against blaming solely unvaccinated people for the spread of the virus. And many with serious immunity issues, or for example, know brain aneurysms who cannot be operated but do not cause immediate issues etc...Are not advised to take the vaccine. They should not be made second class citizens.
The unvaccinated are not solely responsible for spread of the virus, but they are largely responsible. I don't think that helps your argument.
> And many with serious immunity issues, or for example, know brain aneurysms who cannot be operated but do not cause immediate issues etc...Are not advised to take the vaccine. They should not be made second class citizens.
That's a bit of a strawman argument. Most people understand that medical exemptions to the vaccine, and to any use of vaccine passports are reasonable things. Not all governments are competent though to take that into account, but that's specifically their failure, not a failure of the idea.
Wrong in what way? It's true that the vaccines against covid don't provide durable sterilizing immunity, and they aren't expected to. In other words, the vaccines are not expected to prevent most people from getting infected, but rather only from getting seriously sick.
This is true of vaccines in general; vaccines are not expected to prevent infection, and almost none do. For example, flu vaccines don't keep you from from getting infected, and the virus is still able to spread even when vaccination rates are high. Rather, flu vaccines cause you to have less severe symptoms.
Vaccines are designed and tested to prevent disease in spite of infection. The current evidence indicates that the vaccines are doing a good job of preventing hospitalizations due to covid, and I wish the CDC would message this more clearly instead of fearmongering about "breakthrough" infections.
You're erecting a teeny tiny strawman here. I never said they don't reduce infection rates. I said they're designed and tested to prevent serious disease, not infection, and therefore transmission is expected to continue to a significant extent even after we achieve high rates of vaccination.
Please look up sterilizing immunity, and tell me how many common vaccines are known to induce it. I'll give you a hint: there's only one, and it isn't a covid vaccine.
This is a well known feature of vaccines, including the new covid vaccines, and this is supported by the available data, as you might notice from some of the articles that @belter cited earlier.
So I'll ask again, in what way was @belter wrong in your opinion?
> I said they're designed and tested to prevent serious disease, not infection, and therefore transmission is expected to continue to a significant extent even after we achieve high rates of vaccination.
I agree then.
> So I'll ask again, in what way was @belter wrong in your opinion?
I assumed he would make an argument about covid vaccines being ineffective. His actual argument he later made was that the unvaccinated are not solely to blame for spreading of the disease. Which he's right about. But it's a shallow victory because the unvaccinated are actually largely to blame. He's arguing against a strawnan. In the context of the article, presumably it's an argument that the teacher was not negligent for not getting vaccinated, but I don't agree with that.
Imagine how many more it might have been if she were vaccinated but a breakthrough case. Because the vaccine reduces severity but not viral load [1] it might have taken much longer to detect the problem. Vaccines are not a silver bullet. We pretend they are I’ve noticed (recall the cdc saying no more masks last June). We do so at our own peril.
Yes that’s possible, but it still doesn’t excuse idiots who get their health advice from YouTube, celebrities, or talk radio blowhards.
The vaccine reduces the odds of getting the virus (even without symptoms), and if there were no antivaxxers this thing might be almost dead. The fact that 40% of the population won’t vaccine because of quack nonsense is ludicrous.
I’m honestly not sure why anyone listens to celebrities about anything. Has a celebrity ever been right about anything but acting?
There’s not enough nuance in medical reporting for sure but some of the best information for laymen has been available on YouTube, despite early censorship of those warning of the impending pandemic. I’m referring to MedCram and Dr John Campbell specifically. The racaniello podcast as well.
Who should one be listening to for health advice? Anthony Fauci, InStyle cover model? Don Lemon? Bill Gates?
I bet if one group of people weren't threatening to ruin the other group's lives (deny them employment, access to education, custody of their children) you would see more in the second group willing to "vaccinate". Unfortunately the first group has taken an authoritarian posture on the matter and is consequently distrusted.
Actual doctors. Don’t like Fauci pick another actual doctor with expertise in infectious disease and they will probably say similar things.
The reason people’s lives are being ruined is because idiots won’t vaccinate and so we can’t achieve herd immunity fast enough. We could have probably stopped Delta if people listened to experts in medicine about medicine.
Do you listen to dentists about software engineering? Why do people who would never trust armchair opinions in their own field think you can listen to celebrities about medicine? Or politicians?
It’s not a partisan thing either. The antivax thing was a loony left thing before Trump brought in the new age, and if Biden started saying stupid shit about COVID I’d ignore him too. He’s not a doctor either.
> Teacher read to class without a mask despite Covid symptoms
The key problem with anti-vaxxers isn't even necessarily the fact that they don't want to get the vaccine -- it's that anti-vax attitudes tend to go hand in hand with complete pandemic denialism.
Before you turn this into a bitter vax versus anti-vax debate through unjustified insinuations about the teacher, you need to acknowledge two important nuances from the CDC report [1]:
1) Causation was not established. The delta variant was likely circulating throughout the entire school. For example, kids across multiple grade levels tested positive (these kids are not in the same classrooms). Also parents and siblings tested positive. It's very plausible that the teacher was not the 'index' case, even considering symptom onset dates (many infections are asymptomatic especially in children).
2) All 3 vaccinated adults were symptomatic, which speaks to the fact that although the vaccines are still effective at preventing severe outcomes, the delta variant has undermined the efficacy at preventing infection (from 91% to 66%) [2].
> Among the five infected adults, one parent and the teacher were unvaccinated; the others were fully vaccinated. The vaccinated adults and one unvaccinated adult were symptomatic
For you computer people out there it’s a familiar problem. This teacher was sick, and she should’ve been removed. Are there substitutes available? Is there another teacher? If not then teaching simply stops for that class, this is not politically realistic nor is it necessarily advisable.
If nothing else this shows that are society needs a little bit more redundancy. That way the solution is simple - check for symptoms upon entrance and send sick people home. The end
That being said it’s baffling that the teacher took their mask off despite having symptoms. Surely that would’ve helped a little