Anna Foster found the statistics both insulting and infuriating.
A school district resident, she was responding to the 6-3 vote Monday by the South Middleton School Board to make masks optional for students and staff starting Jan. 31.
Foster vented frustration toward board member Eric Berry after he cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was quoted in the Washington Examiner. The article mentioned that, as of last Aug. 21, about 3,650 children had been hospitalized with COVID-19 and, as of Sept. 1, about 400 had died of the virus.
“Rounding the total number of children to 73 million would mean that .0045% of children in the U.S. have been hospitalized for COVID and only .0005% have died from it,” Berry read from the article.
During a public comment period after the vote, Foster took issue with Berry using such statistics to support his position.
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“If your child was one of that miniscule percentage that gets sick, it’s significant,” she told Berry. “If your child is one of that even more miniscule percentage who died, that miniscule percentage is not a comfort because your child is still dead.”
Speaking out in support of a revision to the district health and safety plan, Berry read excerpts from a number of different sources to support his conclusion that wearing masks really doesn’t prevent the spread of respiratory infections like COVID-19. He cited what he called studies from ACP Journals, the CDC and the World Health Organization.
Aside from the Examiner, Berry referenced an Oct. 2, 2021, article from the New York Post in which reporter Conor Skelding interviewed Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. The expert was talking about the need for students to watch people’s mouths in order to learn to speak, read and understand emotions.
“Kids need to see faces,” Berry quoted the professor. “We have this idea that this disease is so bad that we must adopt any means necessary to stop it from spreading. It’s not that masks in schools have no costs. They actually do have substantial costs.”
Berry said the potential harm to a child’s education outweighs the benefits of being overly cautious and maintaining the mask mandate.
“Mr. Berry, I’m pretty sure that I could find just as many contradictory statements to what you gave,” Foster said. “Some of the arguments I heard today were flawed. The masks don’t protect the person wearing the mask. The mask protects everyone else around you. I’m keeping you safe by my mask.
“Some of you on this board ran on a campaign platform that was supposedly for the kids,” Foster said. “But a vote to make masks optional declared that you are not. This vote says you are not only willing to put your own children, but everyone else’s children as well as their teachers and the rest of the staff into a vulnerable position.”
Board members Terry Draper, Bill Hartman and Bethanne Sellers voted against lifting the mandate. They were opposed by Berry, Brad Group, Tony Lucido, Robin Scherer, Shannon Snyder and Rodney Wagner.
Before the vote, Superintendent Jim Estep recommended that children attending pre-school programs hosted in district buildings must continue to wear masks.
There is no vaccine available for children ages 5 and under, Estep said. “These kids are not able to be vaccinated even if their parents want them to be vaccinated. They don’t have the same kind of safety.”
Estep said the protocols under the health and safety plan only apply to South Middleton School District students, not children enrolled in Pre-K Counts, Head Start or any other outside program.
Though opposed to a mask mandate for district students, Lucido said the recommendation on pre-school students should be at the discretion of the superintendent and his administration.
Prior to the vote, the board voted 7-2 against an amendment suggested by Sellers. She wanted the district to set a precise threshold where masks would again be required for a period of seven days whenever the number of positive cases within a building reaches 2% or more of the student body.
“The levels that she is proposing are completely arbitrary,” Lucido said. “I understand there is community disagreement and wide medical disagreement. However, there has never been any medically demonstrated study that shows that cloth masks have any efficiency at reducing the spread of this virus.”
Previously established baseline numbers were formulated at a time when the delta variant — a more serious strain than the current omicron variant — was on the rise nationwide and the opportunity to be vaccinated was limited, Lucido said. “We are proposing to make more draconian rules for our kids to wear masks in an environment where the health officials have acknowledged this [the omicron] variant is far less serious. We have been running an uncontrolled social experiment for the last two years on our kids. I hear all the time that kids are resilient, that masks do not bother them, but we have no idea what we have done.”
Lucido said there are studies that point to major ramifications of masking on a child’s well-being. Wagner agreed that setting a threshold based on case counts is arbitrary. “When we are looking at all these numbers, all we are doing is creating more chaos,” he said. “It’s time to make a decision and move forward.”