Let’s Get a Little Balance with Masks (Letter to County Officials)

First, a little background story:

Our community hosted a public forum with the county board of commissioners.

They asked the head of the health department to speak about our new school mask mandates, instituted just days before the start of school. Each commissioner had 5 minutes to ask him questions after his original 20 minutes. 

The commissioners have no legal power to change anything about the mandate, but they were listening to their constituents, many of whom were outraged. 

Community members were allowed 2 minutes apiece to speak to the board. I was speaker #89, but after 3 hours of the meeting, I had to leave. The meeting lasted 6 full hours. 

When I got home, I decided to send an email to all the commissioners, and I share it with you today in case it can help you communicate kindly and intelligently with people in authority in your own community, whether elected officials, health department employees, or school administration. 

One of the commissioners replied to my email, which had the subject, “speaker #89 bringing some balance,” with this: 

Katie – this may be one of the most thoughtful emails I’ve received. Thank you very much for sharing and providing some suggestions!

I want everyone to remain level-headed and practical and find this balance as well!

I’m sharing the email I sent with you today to give you some inspiration if you choose to contact any of your own local officials regarding mask mandates.

Obviously, many of the details are personal or local to me, but hopefully, it will give you some ideas as you craft your own letter. Down at the bottom of this post I have some snippets you can copy and paste directly into your own letter citing studies. 

Here’s the email:

Good morning commissioners,

I hope you had some restful sleep after yesterday’s marathon session. I was speaker number 89 but could only stay until 1:30 so I’m sharing my thoughts in writing today.

I didn’t need to be at that meeting, because three of my four kids have mask exemptions already. I came to see if I ought to ignore those exemptions and ask my boys in 1st and 5th grades to wear their masks anyway for the good of others. I want to raise my kids to be charitable and generous, willing to make a personal sacrifice for the greater good.

But I have to be convinced that the sacrifice would matter.

As I dropped my son off at elementary school today, my heart hurt to see all those little ones with only half their faces showing. I always want to say, “Take your mask off outside; you don’t even need it yet!”

But some parents were wearing masks outside as well, and it struck me that as much as some see the mask as a sign of oppression, loss of freedom, or errant compliance, others see it as virtuous, safe, and necessary.

Any school board member or government official right now, and especially Dr. London, is in a nearly impossible place. How to please everyone?

You can’t. Which means you must follow the science and do what’s best for the kids.

I must say that you all did a very respectable and commendable job yesterday, representing your constituents and being a good model of civility and cooperation. Thank you.

I’d like to apologize on behalf of the yelling parents for their poor example. When brains are in fight-or-flight, humans can’t think intelligently.

I hope you can read this as if I’m speaking in a calm, rational voice – no yelling emotionally:

We learn and adapt as information and science change. For example, by the end of last school year, we learned in Byron Center that since zero of the hundreds of children who were quarantined as close contacts got sick, that was an intervention that didn’t need to be used anymore.

In the case of masks, we’ve had a full year with them along with a dozen other mitigation strategies. Many school boards had already decided to keep other strategies in place but drop masks, and I hope Dr. London will reassess his risk-risk-benefit analysis.

RISK: What are the risks of COVID-19 for kids?

Data are changing weekly, but in general, although long Covid and multi-systemic inflammatory syndrome are real risks, they are not a huge percentage.

Cases are rising in children, but Delta is more contagious. Is it more dangerous? Most say no, that especially for children, it still generally presents as a cold. Hospitalizations are up simply because transmission is up.

I’m sure you have plenty of sources to help you make this determination. Did you see this study in 800 hospitals showing that the second leading risk factor for death and poor outcomes in Covid-19 patients is now… Fear and anxiety disorders? 

This was a huge study, and I believe it must play a role in deciding the environment in which our children spend 7 hours a day.

If masks decrease their risk of contracting the virus (imperfectly, by a small percentage in real-life situations), how do we balance that with the fact that wearing masks may increase anxiety so much for many children that it causes an increase in negative disease outcomes? If the goal is to keep people out of the hospital, this may be a net-zero (or loss).

RISK: What are the risks of wearing masks all day for kids?

You heard plenty of stories and lots of emotion yesterday and we all know that some of it goes too far. Kids aren’t dropping like flies passing out from these masks, although it may happen to some. But there are some real risks, including cavities and improper oral development if kids mouth-breathe more often because of them, missing out on social and emotional facial cues, and potentially bringing more germs to their face as they fiddle with the masks.

I heard Dr. London say that no studies have shown risks to masks, but that certainly doesn’t mean there are none. We just haven’t proven it empirically yet, but the mental health toll (thank you, Simone Biles, for vaulting that into national attention) of the entire pandemic, including mask-wearing, has been tough on our youth.

Most important: what is the potential BENEFIT?

This is the real question, because if we can show a highly significant potential benefit against a disease that is truly causing imminent danger to our children, then we should all fully embrace these masks. Mask mandates wouldn’t be unconstitutional, because “life” is before “liberty,” and we should all sacrifice our comfort to save others’ lives.

I haven’t had time to read all 60 of the studies on the County Health Department website, because I knew if I did, I would not get enough sleep and put my own immune system more at risk. Those that Dr. London cited have impressive percentage gains, but they are in laboratory situations. As Commissioner Stek pointed out, what 8-year-olds do with the masks isn’t exactly “used as prescribed.”

In that case, perhaps we should discount any studies using mannequins or hamsters or simply using statistics to project an increase from 3 hours to 120 hours of safety, and look at a single study on 90,000 school kids.

This study, conducted at the end of 2020 in a real-life situation, found an insignificant reduction in disease transmission with full masking in school. The summary is a bit misleading, as it includes findings of adults/staff wearing masks reducing the incidence of Covid-19 cases, but it doesn’t mention that data also showed: “The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.” We still don’t have a study that I know of that has been able to isolate masking as a mitigation strategy without other confounding strategies.

How big of a study is 90,000 subjects? That’s nearly twice as many as the safety and efficacy trials (43k participants) AND the 12-15 age group study (6k) that allowed the Pfizer vaccine to get emergency use authorization.

The situation seems clear that masks have not been proven to significantly reduce disease transmission compared to the risks they bring to children.

But what do we do about all those like Dallas Lemier from Black Impact and the eloquent high schooler from Grand River Prep? Can a policy also serve those for whom masks reduce instead of increase fear and anxiety?

Here are some proposed solutions that strike a balance for you to consider:

• Give choice WITH school structure: what if parents were asked through a simple survey whether they wanted their child in a masked classroom or not? Certain classrooms or a quadrant of a classroom (if the number is fairly small of those who prefer masks) could commit to wearing masks all day, while others are free to be unmasked. People want autonomy and/or safety, and I believe a hybrid situation like that would give everyone what they need. It is asking a lot of the schools, but the health department is already doing that.
• Focus on education: decrease fear by empowering people with the knowledge of good hygiene, exercise, sleep, avoiding sugar, eating nourishing foods, all to build up one’s own immune system. And then share how to tackle this virus at home with early intervention in case of transmission. I imagine cases in kids and teens are about to go up this week and next, but will it be because kids are in school together…or because they’ve all lost 1-2 hours of sleep compared to summer schedules and their immune systems are reeling? Many kids have been together often over the summer…
• At the VERY least, Dr. London, when you communicate the importance of accepting exemptions to the schools (you said you would after a commissioner’s question, in case you didn’t write that down and forgot), PLEASE strongly encourage schools to figure out how to give their kids mask breaks. This time of year, teachers should be taking kids outside to read aloud, giving lots of recess, holding PE outside, etc. I know of schools last year that did not even allow students to take masks off during recess! For a friend’s daughter who got headaches daily, the simple change of unmasked recess made a 100% difference when that finally took place in May. Please, as our public health official, remind the schools that kids really do need breaks regularly throughout the day for unobstructed breathing.

In closing, I keep coming back to our school experience in 2019-2020. My kindergartener had a classmate battling leukemia that year.

We were asked during the open house to be extra careful to keep our kids home at any sign of a fever, since getting a fever would send Charlie (name has been changed) directly to the hospital. Chemo for 2 years had completely eliminated his own immune system. With tears in all of the mothers’ eyes, we nodded solemnly and did everything we could to protect the little boy.

That year, Charlie wore a mask at school. All the kids did one day, during the first week of school, so they would know what it was like and destigmatize it.

But even for a child with zero immune system, the other kids weren’t asked to mask up daily. They weren’t even asked to mask up when they were sneezing and coughing, although I believe the teacher took it upon herself to hand out a few masks throughout the year for particularly drippy-nosed children.

Who could have guessed that we were experiencing an eerie specter of what was to come for everyone?

But I can’t help but fixate on the fact that Charlie’s cancer doctors never asked the whole class to protect him, the ultimate in vulnerability, by wearing masks. We all would have, gladly, I believe, when around that little boy.

If I could be convinced that science has changed enough on masking in the past 2 years, I’d be more on board with universal masking (although I’d still say mandates are a good way to get about 30-50% of the people to rebel and critically question, and there are more effective psychological ways to get a population on board).

But with that study I cited above, I’m not convinced.

Our kids are now the “Charlie” we need to protect. A year of pandemic fear has knocked down their mental health, and that has become more important than the minuscule impact masks may make on Covid transmission.

Let’s find a balance. Thank you for listening.

Now it’s Your Turn to Take Action!

Here are some sections from my letter you can copy and paste to get you started with some stats and ideas. 

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RISK: What are the risks of COVID-19 for kids?

Data are changing weekly, but in general, although long Covid and multi-systemic inflammatory syndrome are real risks, they are not a huge percentage.

Cases are rising in children, but Delta is more contagious. Is it more dangerous? Most say no, that especially for children, it still generally presents as a cold. Hospitalizations are up simply because transmission is up.

I’m sure you have plenty of sources to help you make your decision. Did you see this study in 800 hospitals showing that the second leading risk factor for death and poor outcomes in Covid-19 patients is now… Fear and anxiety disorders? 

This was a huge study, and I believe it must play a role in deciding the environment in which our children spend 7 hours a day.

If masks decrease their risk of contracting the virus (imperfectly, by a small percentage in real-life situations), how do we balance that with the fact that wearing masks may increase anxiety so much for many children that it causes an increase in negative disease outcomes? If the goal is to keep people out of the hospital, this may be a net-zero (or loss).

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RELATED: Our family’s COVID protocol.

The benefits of masks:

Here are my proposed solutions:

Here are some proposed solutions that strike a balance for you to consider:

• Give choice WITH school structure: what if parents were asked through a simple survey whether they wanted their child in a masked classroom or not? Certain classrooms or a quadrant of a classroom (if the number is fairly small of those who prefer masks) could commit to wearing masks all day, while others are free to be unmasked. People want autonomy and/or safety, and I believe a hybrid situation like that would give everyone what they need. It is asking a lot of the schools, but the health department is already doing that.
• Focus on education: decrease fear by empowering people with the knowledge of good hygiene, exercise, sleep, avoiding sugar, eating nourishing foods, all to build up one’s own immune system. And then share how to tackle this virus at home with early intervention in case of transmission. I imagine cases in kids and teens are about to go up this week and next, but will it be because kids are in school together…or because they’ve all lost 1-2 hours of sleep compared to summer schedules and their immune systems are reeling? Many kids have been together often over the summer…
• At the VERY least, PLEASE strongly encourage schools to figure out how to give their kids mask breaks. This time of year, teachers should be taking kids outside to read aloud, giving lots of recess, holding PE outside, etc. I know of schools last year that did not even allow students to take masks off during recess! For a friend’s daughter who got headaches daily, the simple change of unmasked recess made a 100% difference when that finally took place in May. Please, remind the schools that kids really do need breaks regularly throughout the day for unobstructed breathing.

[question]Please feel free to personalize this letter to fit your area and send it to your own officials![/question]