To get a better sense of what happened in Florida during the state’s Delta surge, National Review filed public-records requests with the school districts in all the state’s 67 counties, asking for the number of COVID-19 cases among both students and staff from the first day of school through September 21, and for the total number of students and staff in each district. Sixty of the school districts provided a response to the request.

The data show that many of the school districts that instituted the strictest mask mandates — mandates that required a doctor’s approval for an exemption — had among the lowest percentages of students and staff who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 this year. But there also is evidence that those lower percentages were driven not by district mask policies but by larger community trends, including vaccination rates and natural immunity. Some regions of the state were just hit harder by Delta than others, regardless of any one county’s masking policy, the data show.

And there are several examples — including on the Treasure Coast — where districts without mask requirements had similar, and sometimes lower, percentages of students who tested positive for the virus than did neighboring districts with stricter mask requirements.