New COVID-19 Data Supports Ending School Mask Mandates
A new study from the United Kingdom provides some great news about kids and COVID-19. The study looks at contacts of patients with a positive PCR test. It covers the time period when the Alpha variant was dominant through when the Delta variant became the most common. First, let’s celebrate the good news. It does not appear that the rate of children catching and transmitting COVID-19 has changed with the Delta variant.
These graphs show a lower rate of secondary infection, also called transmission, between children and adults in the precise settings where authoritarians like New York Governor Kathy Hochul are mandating masks for young children.
The green line represents work or education settings. The graph on the left shows COVID-19-positive individuals under 20 passing COVID-19 to a person at work or school at a rate of 1 in 10. Below age ten, it is 1 in 20 or less. For young children, this is a significant contrast with the overall study transmission rate. Of the 139,164 contacts of COVID-1- positive individuals studied, 51,789, or 1 in 3.8, tested positive.
This trend does not change significantly within the household. A child under the age of ten has a 1.5 in 10 chance of passing COVID-19 to a household member. That probability decreases to less than 1 in 10 at younger ages. On the right side of the graph, you see a child ten and under is more likely to test positive for COVID-19 due to a COVID-19-positive family member. Young children are far less likely to test positive than older people after contact with a COVID-19-positive individual in an educational setting. Those chances are about 1.3 in 10.- READ MORE
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