A recently published report on masking in schools is designed to help administrators and school boards cut through the screaming and yelling to try to make an informed decision.
The paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association models different scenarios for an average-sized elementary school, with the intent of giving decision-makers an idea of what could happen if they were to make changes to their school’s mitigation efforts.
“What we tried to do in this paper was to use data that people might have on hand,” like the level of community spread of the virus and the level of vaccination, said senior author Dr. Andrea Ciaranello of Massachusetts General Hospital.
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“You can simulate if somebody enters that school community with SARS-CoV-2 — what’s the chance that they would spread it, given each of those interactions that they’re having in a day?”
While masks are proven effective, she said there is no definitive level of their protection, so the model offers a sliding scale.
“What if you think that masks add only a little bit to what you otherwise have in your school, like maybe ventilation and handwashing? What if you think they add a lot of benefits? And then people can kind of find where they think their school might fall,” she explained.
Ciaranello said it’s also important to weigh the downside of masks in schools. However, the first step in the decision-making process has to be an open discussion on the goals of mitigation efforts and how much risk is acceptable.
“I do hope that this will be helpful at the local level, if people have more nuanced local data that they can then use them in estimating what the potential impact of their decisions might be.”
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