As school boards across Florida flaunt Governor DeSantis’s executive order allowing parental opt-out of school district mask policies, let’s take a deep dive into mask policies and the impacts they have (or don’t have) on cases per students in each district…
For both the ‘20/’21 and ‘21/’22 school years, the data shows that there is no correlation between mask policy and cases. Therefore, mandating masks is not an effective way to impact cases within schools.
If mask mandate policies were effective, we would see that the majority of the school districts that had the lowest cases per in-person students would have mask mandates whereas mask optional districts would have the highest cases per in-person students.
This is not the reality. There is no correlation between mask policy and cases.
For last school year, the four districts with the highest cases per students were all mask required.
The district with the lowest cases per students did not require masks.
Last year, the top half of districts with the lowest cases per student were made up of:
12 mask optional districts
22 mask required districts
The bottom half of districts with the highest cases per student were made up of:
15 mask optional districts
18 mask required districts
Nearly evenly split. There is no definitive grouping of mask required districts weighted toward lower cases and there is no definitive grouping of mask optional districts with higher cases, as would be expected if masks made a difference. Instead, the policies are completely uncorrelated to case rates.
This definitively proves there is no correlation whatsoever between mask policies and cases.
For this school year, the current circulating variant of SARS-COV2 is much more infectious than the variant circulating the previous school year. This means regardless of mask policy, there will be more cases as compared to the previous school year.
For the data of cases per student, as the school year is still in the first quarter, the data must be corrected by number of days open. Not each district opened the same day. If you don’t correct for number of days open, districts that opened earlier would incorrectly be shown has having more cases.
Not every school district has a covid dashboard, and not every district that has a dashboard keeps a cumulative number of cases. Some only show active cases.
The following statements are from data pulled from districts that:
Have their own covid dashboard
Make a cumulative number available.
From that data:
This school year the top half of districts with the lowest cases per student were made up of:
10 mask optional districts
4 mask required districts
5 mixed mask policy districts
The bottom half of districts with the highest cases per student were made up of:
14 mask optional districts
1 mask required districts
4 mixed mask policy districts
AGAIN the data shows that there is NO correlation between mask policy and cases. If masks made a difference in cases, especially with a more infectious variant, we would see the mask required districts would consistently be below mask optional districts. Instead, we see Putnam, Gadsen, Nassau, Collier and Polk, all mask optional districts, have lower cases than 2 mask required districts; Alachua and Hillsborough, and 7 mixed mask policy districts.
Instead of trying to force a theory (masks work) to reality (they do not), school districts should focus on what actually does work. And that’s diluting the volume of infectious viral load in the air by increasing fresh air circulation.
