The left's coming defeat in the mask wars

Although there are still some holdouts who believe so-called remote learning was a necessary and costless mitigation strategy, it is now widely acknowledged to have had grievous educational costs with no public-health rationale. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote a retrospective on the schools debate the other day headlined, “School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It.”

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The mask mandates will fare almost as poorly, and the political and intellectual backlash is building, with huge fights over mandates in Virginia and New York State.

A notable piece in the Atlantic by three public-health experts eviscerated the case for school mask mandates. It related how a randomized trial in Denmark found no significant effects from masks on reducing transmission, and a study in Bangladesh found that surgical masks had some effect on reducing transmission. But importantly, the studies weren’t of children.

A Brown University study of schools in New York, Massachusetts, and Florida didn’t find any correlation between student case numbers and mask mandates. The same is true of a study in Science magazine. Analysis of the data from schools around the country points the same way.

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