To Mask or not to two - Mask Megathread cont.

And how exactly are sure it’s NOT going to have a negative affect on children ? What’s their ability to cope etc got to do with shoving a rag on their mouth and nose like some kind of animals.

All the while hilariously the teachers , parents and grandparents are virtually all vaccinated. Total lunacy that this is even being contemplated.

Children have died from covid. If not here, then in other countries.

Flu is more deadly for children but covid has the potential to overwhelm public health services in a way that flu does not - public health capacity that is needed to treat all citizens, including children, for covid and other injuries and illnesses. Those are the stakes and always have been.

If you want to talk about other benefits for children, well how many school days are missed if they are a suspected or actual covid case and the same for teachers. Masks would reduce the risk of interruption to their education. Masks would ALSO protect against flu transmission until kids are older and better able to respond to it \ process the vaccination - as a temporary measure during the current emergency while medical services are under severe strain. So masks for school children right now make sense and the evidence from Arizona shows how they reduce outbreaks.

Emotional development doesn't stop at 13.

Every flu season no, where we have flu & covid OR something novel like swine flu.

I think masks wouldn't be an issue for the majority of classes, but could complicate languages, pronunciation, music that kind of thing. Those complications could be mitigated by homework and the advances in use of phone, digital devices etc for audio homework. Things not readily available during my schooldays.

I think masks are an important but temporary measure. I would prefer if the long term focus was not on masks but on better ventilation, air filtration, portable air filter systems in workplaces, schools, nightclubs etc. I think a portable air filtration unit in a nightclub to be much more useful measure than limited mask wearing.

So kids should wear masks because somewhere in the world a child has died of covid.

Should we wait for an Irish kid to die even though we know from global experience covid kills kids?

That is usually what happens here... we wait for someone to die even though we could have easily prevented it by paying attention to what happened elsewhere.

Hundreds of kids have died in the US from covid. Not 'a child'.

But as I said the main reason for kids to wear masks is to protect the public health and education systems and staff, which they benefit from.

All the available evidence - lab studies on mechanism of mask action, real world contact tracing examples and studies from multiple locations and settings as cited on this thread prove otherwise.

Its neither pointless nor a magic bullet, but a low cost effective measure to reduce cases and outbreaks.

Thats not just my verdict but that of every major health authority in the world.

I wonder why there are so many cases lately despite all the mask wearing. Its as if mask wearing doesn’t really do much in the real world

So you accept covid can kill children.

Therefore you might consider it over cautious to wear masks but it is of potential small direct benefit to them and so not pointless.

And mask wearing for covid also helps protect kids from flu.

Then we consider mask wearing also helps to protect their teachers, reduces risk of missing school days.. and my previous points re the public health system...

So hardly ridiculous. Now if we cant vaccinate kids in that age bracket maybe we will reach a point where it makes sense for kids to go through herd immunity of covid, with its attendant risks. But I dont think its an obvious call. Each have their pros and cons.

Do you wonder why people are still dying in car crashes even though we have seatbelts and air bags and other safety features?

Are you aware of the Delta variant?

Consider if you can what the case count would be if we were only dealing with Alpha variant versus vaccined and masks.

Now consider what the case count would be for Delta variant without vaccines and masks.

There, you will have answered your own question

I'm sorry Gortanna, but you are playing games as usual. You've done it before on this thread and nothing changed. I give you thumbs up for being polite.

Sure you "genuinely" worked it out to something like 0.00000001%

123,000 deaths in England with 100 of them being children.

Answer looks a lot more like .0813% just incase you decide to post that again elsewhere.