One of the most frustrating aspects of the ‘war’ on COVID waged by our overlords in the name of health and safety has been the forcible muzzling of children in schools, particularly when playing outside or participating in sports. This virus has never been significantly driven by spread between or from children, yet they are the ones seemingly being punished with overbearing restrictions that last from the time they step on the school bus early in the mornings until they step off in the afternoon.
When complaints arise on social media, invariably some virtue-signaling, do-gooder parents will chime in that their children are “used to it” and “never complain” about having to wear a piece of cloth over the holes through which they breathe for most of their days. Well, I suppose prisoners eventually get “used” to having to wear chains too, but that doesn’t make it natural. However, while chaining prisoners is necessary from time to time for security and safety reasons, it was never necessary to mask children, especially younger ones, and the data seems to increasingly be bearing this out.
Consider this dataset on COVID spread in schools from Brown University Professor Emily Oster, hardly a member of Team Reality. Launched last fall, Oster’s “COVID dashboard project” has attempted to make up for the lack of a “coordinated federal effort to track COVID cases in context.”
“By ‘in context’ I mean with information on how many people were in in-person school and what mitigation factors allowed school to operate safely,” Oster writes in a March 1 dashboard update.
The amount of data collected here, although not exhaustive, seems surprisingly voluminous and impressive:
When we launched the dashboard in early September, our first announcement included about 100,000 in-person students. All of the data in that wave came from schools and districts that opted-in to the study to provide their information. These data provided a first, early look at case rates in schools. The sample was selected, yes, but it provided a first look at case rates in schools.
