Mackem DJ
Striker
Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directs COVID-19 response for the UCSF Emergency Department at the University of California, San Francisco: "Kids don't need to be masked. Full stop. They have minuscule risk of serious illness or death from COVID."
It's hard for children to wear masks properly
Teachers and parents often report that proper mask-wearing is difficult and requires constant reinforcement by teachers. That's especially true for young children and those with special needs.
Bernadette Ngoh, who runs an in-home day care in West Haven, Conn., spends time almost every day sitting down with children and telling them why masks are important. She calls it "The biggest challenge ... What do we do with all the kids that are unable to wear the mask and stay with the mask?"
Brittany Gonzalez teaches special education to Florida second- and third-graders in Lee County. Her students aren't required to wear masks. Those who do "take it off all day," she said. "It is a foreign piece of cloth on their face. And not all of them have the level of understanding as to why we're doing it and what it means and how to wear it."
Masks can interfere with young children's brain development
Numerous scientific papers have established that it can be harder to hear and understand speech and identify facial expressions and emotions when people are wearing masks. (Some of these studies also suggest workarounds, which many practitioners are using).
These are critical developmental tasks, particularly for children in the first three years of life.
EDUCATION
When can kids take off their masks in school? Here's what some experts say
The United States is an outlier in recommending masks from the age of 2 years old. The World Health Organization does not recommend masks for children under age 5, while the European equivalent of the CDC doesn't recommend them for children under age 12.
Manfred Spitzer is a psychiatrist and a cognitive neuroscientist in Germany.
He published a scientific review of evidence on how masking could impact children's development.
Spitzer says the negatives of masking are particularly clear for very young children. He believes that young children's caregivers should be unmasked as well.
"Kids need to train up their face recognition," he says, and they need to see full faces to learn to identify emotions as well as to learn language. "Babies were never designed just to see the upper half of the face and to infer the lower half; even adults have a hard time doing this."
After 2 years, growing calls to take masks off children in school
While issues around masking remain polarized, there are growing calls for a post-omicron off-ramp for kids and masks.www.npr.org
Wibble wibble wibble. ( Havent read )
covid crackpot bingo
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