Masks Cut Covid Spread in Schools, New Study details

Masks have been a cultural flash point since the start of the pandemic, and mask mandates in schools have been especially incendiary. Critics have argued that there is no strong evidence to prove that masks slow the spread of Covid, and that in any case children weren’t wearing the right kinds of masks or weren’t wearing them properly.

Now a research paper details a so-called natural experiment that occurred when all but two school districts in the greater Boston area lifted mask requirements in the spring. Researchers took that opportunity to make a direct comparison of the spread of Covid in masking and non-masking schools.

The bottom line: Masking mandates were linked with significantly reduced numbers of Covid cases in schools.

Infection rates were lower among masked students — even in Boston’s public schools, where many buildings are old and lack good ventilation systems, classrooms are crowded and students are more often from at-risk communities — than among unmasked students attending newer schools in communities like Cambridge and Newton.

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ALSO SEE: Lifting Universal Masking in Schools — Covid-19 Incidence among Students and Staff

AND: Mask wearing in community settings reduces SARS-CoV-2 transmission

The study, by scientists at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston University School of Public Health and Boston’s Public Health Commission, was published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The data should help dispel misinformation about the effectiveness of universal masking requirements in stemming viral transmission in schools, said Julia Raifman, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and an author of an editorial accompanying the new study.

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