New school-masking research helps define best practices

(Photo by Kelly Sikkema, Unsplashed)

School masking policies remain topics of tension, but studies like a new one in the New England Journal of Medicine may help inform the debate, reports Donna St. George of The Washington Post: "Public schools that kept universal masking requirements in place last year had significantly fewer coronavirus cases than their counterparts that lifted mandates as state policies changed. . . This new study from Boston and Chelsa, Mass., has shed some light on what might work as the best protection."

"The study, which followed schools in the Boston region during the 2021-22 academic year, found that the end of mask requirements was associated with an additional 45 coronavirus cases per 1,000 students and staff members — or nearly 12,000 cases during a 15-week period from March to June. . . The findings support on-ramps and off-ramps for mask mandates," St. George writes.

The study by researchers from Harvard University, Boston University and the Boston Public Health Commission found that masking was just one strategy for avoiding virus transmission. "Universal masking helped most when the levels of virus were highest, suggesting that the safety measure is most useful just before or throughout periods of high transmission," St. George reports.

Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focused on health issues, told St. George the study demonstrated a “sizable” effect of universal masking — a finding that could be useful to efforts to control a future coronavirus variant or another infectious disease: “This is a very low-cost, highly effective intervention.”

When it comes to avoiding RSV, influenza, and Covid-19, Meagan Fitzpatrick, an epidemiologist and infectious-disease transmission modeler at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told St. George, “Masking is one of the rare tools that can combat all of these.”