David Zweig

A topline finding of the Duke/ABC Science Collaborative report, and what they claim here, is that masks in schools help lower transmission. Except all their schools were under a mask mandate. I asked the authors how they could make a claim on masks when there was no control ...

In order to claim an effect you must compare one group with an intervention to a different group *without* the intervention, which they didn't do. Instead, the authors replied with the Israeli study, saying that showed masks in schools work. Except...

1)You cannot use another study as evidence for a claimed finding in your study 2)The Israel study was of grades 7-12; windows were closed; and all schools were exempt from masks. If anything, the fact that there was only one outbreak suggests the lack of effectiveness of masks

The authors do the same thing in this Opinion piece, citing some districts that had mask mandates and low transmission as evidence of their effectiveness, and cherry picking some places that didn't to suggest the opposite...

Yet schools in Florida, and more so throughout many parts of Europe did not and do not have mask mandates for kids, with varying age cutoffs, and there is no correlated explosion of cases originated in those schools

Sadly, they buried the lede from their report, which is that distancing of more than 3 feet or less than 3 feet made no difference in transmission rates