With millions of Americans having received the COVID-19 vaccination, cases of the deadly virus have diminished so much that the Biden administration and state and local officials have begun to reign in restrictions, including mask mandates.
Unfortunately for parents and their school-age children, those mask mandates are still in place for schools.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been calling for school boards to lift the mask mandates, is now saying that “the data speaks for itself” as he points to a recent finding that shows there isn’t a correlation between “mask mandates in schools” and the transmission of COVID-`19.
The Florida Department of Education, which will be meeting on June 10 to discuss statewide curriculums and Critical Race Theory, is publicizing the recent Medrxiv report findings.
Here is what the report finds:
This paper reports on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student COVID-19 case rates in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year. We analyze data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and focus on student density, ventilation upgrades, and masking. We find higher student COVID-19 rates in schools and districts with lower in-person density but no correlations in staff rates. Ventilation upgrades are correlated with lower rates in Florida but not in New York. We do not find any correlations with mask mandates. All rates are lower in the spring after teacher vaccination is underway.
In a public health care roundtable back in March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) shared his thoughts on lifting a mask mandate, stressing that “ultimately individuals should be able to make their own decisions.”
When asked about Florida’s future regarding the use of masks, Governor DeSantis expressed that the state would be moving forward with easing restrictions about mask-wearing. “There are actually some places in our country…where you can potentially have ..jail for not wearing a mask,” DeSantis explained, calling it “way, way overboard.”
In early May, DeSantis granted clemency for anyone prosecuted after being charged for not wearing a mask during the pandemic.
DeSantis says that schools will get back to "normal" by the beginning of the 2022 school year, and kids will not be forced to wear a mask.
