the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, across the country and in New Jersey kids are headed back to school this week, so the Ridgewood blog thought we would offer the latest case for children wearing masks for six hours a day.
Governor Phil Murphy announced that all students, educators, staff, and visitors will be required to wear face masks indoors for the start of the 2021-2022 school year. The Governor signed Executive Order (EO) 251, which will mandate masking in the indoor premises of all public, private, and parochial preschool, elementary, and secondary school buildings, with limited exceptions. The EO is effective on Monday, August 9, 2021.
Guess what , there isn’t any, that’s right NONE! There is simply no case to be made for school children to wear masks .
Liberal journalist, David Zweig has just published in New York Magazine a comprehensive review of the science on school mask mandates and it is hard to argue with his findings.
“Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms. Conspicuously, there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”
“These countries, along with the World Health Organization, whose child-masking guidance differs substantially from the CDC’s recommendations, have explicitly recognized that the decision to mask students carries with it potential academic and social harms for children and may lack a clear benefit. To date, the highly transmissible Delta variant has not led them to change this calculus.
The NY Times published an embarrassing opinion piece yesterday about the benefits of masking students.
Regardless of your mask beliefs, the benefits listed in the opinion piece were ridiculous.