Ending Mask Mandates

On Tuesday, The Western Journal posted an article about a recent recommendation from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The article reports:

With mask mandates for students and teachers increasingly under fire, one of the major children’s hospitals in the country is recommending that facial coverings no longer be required.

Dr. David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said masks should not be considered necessary, WCAU-TV reported Monday.

“We are in a very different moment in this pandemic,” Rubin told the station.

Rubin suggested that it is finally time to start getting back to normal in the school setting, particularly since cases of COVID-19 omicron variant among children are more on the level of other seasonal viruses.

…In January, Rubin also advocated for fully re-opening schools and getting kids back into normal school settings, NPR reported.

He pointed to the fact that children are not as susceptible to the virus and that for the sake of mental health and normality, they should be in regular school settings.

“The spectrum of illness is very consistent with what we take care of each year, and we’re actually seeing fewer kids in the ICU proportionally this phase,” Rubin told NPR.

He also argued that the harm being done from keeping kids at home or in abnormal settings is now outweighing the good of keeping them from getting COVID.

As expected, he has gotten pushback from the teacher’s unions.

The article notes:

The school district also just introduced a stricter mask policy than it had. According to KYW-TV, the district announced last week that cloth masks, which had previously been acceptable, would no longer be enough. Students and staff would now be required to wear N95, KN95 or KF94 surgical masks.

Since children are not at high risk for complications from Covid, why are they the ones being required to wear masks? Is the masking of children nothing more than a security blanket for teachers who fear the disease?

The article concludes:

Philadelphia Health Commissioner Dr. Cheryl Bettigole defended the policy by citing the fact that many adults across the city have not yet been vaccinated and said children are doing fine with masks.

“With children of all ages…they’re quite resilient. They do very well with masking. Of course, we would all love to get rid of those masks,” Bettigole said.

“I understand the CHOP PolicyLab perspective, but when we look across the city, we still see, we have 250,000 adults who are still unvaccinated,” she added.

We know that children are not the ones in danger from the disease and are not the spreaders of the disease, so why are we masking them?