Outside of Israel and France, no major COVID outbreaks have been attributed to schoolchildren. Much of Europe is not masking children in schools. While some countries, e.g. Austria or Scotland, will begin the school year with masks, they are expected to start phasing out the requirement for young children within weeks. Norway explicitly advises against masking school-aged children. And Denmark is specifically prioritizing “normalcy” as a part of public health.

And yet, here in the United States, we are not just putting masks on toddlers, we are still putting up plexiglass dividers in some classrooms as a way to establish distancing of students — even though the only evidence we have about such dividers’ effectiveness suggests that they may increase transmission of the virus. Our CDC is still sticking to student-masking “guidance” that is out of line with the World Health Organization’s advice, which holds that “Children aged 5 years and under should not be required to wear masks.” Occasionally, our children have even been asked to wear masks while playing sports, including, in some cases, outdoor sports. We are now entering a third school year marred by these rules, most of which have no solid evidentiary basis. This may feel like the blink of an eye for some adults, but for many children, especially school-aged children, it has become a childhood-defining experience.

One begins to suspect that if there is actually a metric that will cause school districts to stop requiring masks and the CDC to stop recommending them for small children, it is a political metric rather than a medical one: Mask mandates will only end when enough parents stop tolerating them.

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