The bottom line is that anybody who cites this study as a point in favor of mask mandates is selling you something you shouldn’t buy, writes TPCarney.
I doubt it, but preventing one case per month is the best-case interpretation of a recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Incredibly, this study is somehow being touted as proof that mask mandates work. You could just as easily point out that the study found that mask-mandatory schools reported nearly three times as many COVID cases as mask-optional schools.
In mask-optional schools, a higher portion of cases was traced to in-school infection, yet still, a vast majority of all infections in these schools happened outside of school, according to this study. Remember, in-school transmission was always modest. The study found that for every 1,000 students in a mask-optional school, about 14 got COVID in school between the beginning of the school year and mid-December . In the mask-mandatory schools, about seven students got COVID in school in that same period. The average time period studied was 13.5 weeks of school.
In an attempt to study in-school transmission rather than simply the total number of students and teachers who tested positive, the researchers looked only at “secondary cases” — that is, a COVID-positive student or teacher whose infection was linked, by contact tracing, to another COVID-positive student or teacher at the same school.