Pity the poor school board member who has to respond to an unavoidable reality brought on by a more contagious, more virulent variant of COVID-19. But the path ahead is becoming clear: To prevent illness and keep schools open, face masks should be required in the classrooms — at least in the elementary grades.
That’s far from what anyone expected when rising vaccination rates seemed to bring the contagion under control. Lewiston and other school districts dropped their face mask mandates last spring.
But infection rates are rising in states such as Idaho where vaccination rates have lagged. Within north central Idaho:
l Nez Perce County reported an infection rate of 59.7 per 100,000 population. The last time it reached that level was in December. Only 41.5 percent of its population age 12 and older has been vaccinated.
l Latah County — 13.5 infections per 100,000 population, the highest it’s been since late April. Just over half of the county’s population age 12 and older has been vaccinated.
l Idaho County — 22.3 infections per 100,000, the highest in almost three months. Its vaccination rate is 28.3 percent.
l Lewis County— About 40 infections per 100,000. It has not been that high since June. Its vaccination rate is 44.5 percent.
l Clearwater County — 53.8 infections per 100,000, the highest since January. About 36.2 percent of its population ages 12 and older got the shot.
Hence, the region can’t ignore advice from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics have issued. In school, students — both vaccinated or not — should wear masks.
And the picture is inverted. Whereas last year, the threat of illness was greater among staff and older students, today it’s the grade school children who are at greater risk.
Those younger than 12 cannot be vaccinated.
There’s anecdotal evidence that the delta variant is inflicting more serious illness on younger children. Since late July, child COVID-19 cases jumped 4 percent. If nothing else, younger children are capable of spreading this variant more quickly than the strain that was prevalent a year ago. That creates a greater threat for vulnerable populations at home: the unvaccinated, those with compromised immune systems and the elderly for whom the vaccination’s protection may begin to wane.
The trend is already unfolding.
Last week, the Boise School District Board followed CDC protocols by implementing a face mask mandate for all students, staff and visitors, regardless of whether they’ve been vaccinated. Moscow schools will operate under a mask mandate for at least the first three weeks of school. The state’s four-year universities, including University of Idaho, have implemented mandates of their own.
In eastern Idaho, more than a dozen physicians are calling on Idaho Falls to at least mask up its elementary schools. To do otherwise, they say, puts the health of students, staff and the community at risk. It places in-person instruction in jeopardy and may inflict undue pressure on the region’s health care system, they said.
For the youngest children, face-masking is the most effective tool available. So says a group of doctors who studied face mask efficacy among students in North Carolina.
“Although vaccination is the best way to prevent COVID-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection,” Kanecia Zimmerman of the Duke University School of Medicine and Danny Benjamin Jr. of Duke Health wrote Tuesday in the New York Times.
From March through June, they reported that face masking held new COVID -19 cases to only 363, although the school population had been exposed to more than 7,000 children and adults who attended class while infectious.
“We believe this low rate of transmission occurred because of the mask-on-mask school environment: Both the infected person and the close contact wore masks,” Zimmerman and Benjamin wrote.
Expect howls from protesting parents. Expect school board members to cringe at this idea. But Idaho law gives them the ultimate authority — and the responsibility for what follows.
As unappealing as a face mask mandate at school may seem, the alternatives — more infections, sending students home and remote instruction — are worse. — M.T.
