Mask Mandates, Incredibly, Return to More School Districts

General mask mandates for most of the country have all but ended.

Outside of a few fanatical true believers like Los Angeles County and entertainment industry events like Comic-Con, almost no one is still mandating masks to go about daily life.

What they are doing however, is forcing masks back onto children in schools.

Perhaps the most indefensible "intervention" during the pandemic, school masking has confusingly become the most prominent reoccurring mandate across the country.

While it has seemed like this inexcusable policy would mostly be limited to far left areas, the most recent announcement comes from a much more surprising city; Louisville, Kentucky.

Starting Monday, July 25th, Louisville schools are now requiring masking at all facility locations and on buses:

Louisville joins San Diego schools, who also announced a mandate of their own recently.

Incredibly, that mandate was defended by a local official who claimed that students who can't or don't want to wear masks should just not come to school:

This is despite the overwhelming amount of data and evidence that's accumulated over the past several years that school masking is completely ineffective. Not to mention the tremendous learning loss from virtual schooling and missed in person education that Whitehurst-Payne ignores.

Just recently, a study on school masking was released comparing two school districts in North Dakota during the fall and winter of 2021-2022.

The Fargo district had a mask mandate in effect starting when school returned in August, while their neighboring schools in the West Fargo district did not.

The results were nearly identical, with Fargo (in black) having a higher peak than their maskless neighbors:

The study authors even attempted to get compliance rates, which based on their conversations, showed that roughly 5% or less of students in the non-mandate schools were masking, compared to 95+% in the mandate district.

Many more studies and comparisons show the same results.

After the school mask mandates were lifted in Virginia, cases fell dramatically, and comparisons of states without and without school mask mandates showed case rates were higher overall in the forced masking locations:

There is simply no justification for continuing to mandate masks in schools.

While it's unsurprising that cities in California or New York or Illinois will inevitably bring back mandates to assuage their own fears, it's disturbing that a city in a red state like Kentucky would also return to forced masking.

Parents in these areas might have assumed that their children would be spared from this ineffective, destructive policy. But Louisville shows once again that the commitment to anti-science appeals to authority is possible anywhere.

Once again, Ron DeSantis has shown that he is head and shoulders above most politicians, correctly realizing that banning school masking is the only way to ensure that kids aren't forced to placate delusional adults.