Ministers of Death: Republican Governors Leave Kids 100% Defenseless Against Delta Surge
Daily Kos, Aug. 11, 2021.
Kids will die because Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas are using the pandemic to score political points with a radicalized minority of Americans. Their No. 1 job as governors is to protect the lives of their constituents. But where adults have the luxury of choosing whether to get vaccinated against COVID-19, children have been rendered uniquely vulnerable to what is now a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," as my colleague Mark Sumner wrote.
Kids old enough to get vaccinated (12-17) are still at the mercy of the views of their parents, far too many of whom are more fearful of the vaccines than of the delta variant currently hospitalizing considerably more children than earlier in the pandemic. But even more defenseless is the under-12 cohort of children who aren't yet eligible to get the vaccine. That vulnerability has been compounded as kids finally return to the in-person learning so critical to their growth, development, and mental health.
What can protect those children, however, is universal in-school masking for students and staff. It's been studied by Duke University researchers who tracked COVID-19 transmission in North Carolina K-12 schools across 100 school districts, 14 charter schools, 160,549 school staffers, and more than 864,515 students attending in-school instruction. "We have learned a few things for certain," wrote the researchers, Dr. Kanecia Zimmerman, associate professor of pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine, and Dr. Danny Benjamin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Duke Health. "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."
In a follow-up interview with PBS News Hour, Dr. Benjamin stressed the efficacy of universal in-school masking. "What we found was despite having extremely widespread COVID in the communities in North Carolina, if universal masking is in place, the chances of one child infecting another is less than 1 percent," he said.
Voluntary masking, on the other hand, is about as useless as universal masking is effective...
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/11/2045184/-Ministers-of-death-Republican-governors-leave-kids-100-defenseless-against-delta-surge
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