The study had admirable goals — an attempt to assess the importance of masking in preventing “secondary” cases. Primary cases are defined as infections that came from the community, while secondary cases refers to transmission that seemingly occurred in schools.
To do this, the researchers contacted 13,800 school districts. 143 responded with interest in filling out a survey. 85 completed the survey. Here’s how that looks visually:
Immediately, the problems are noticeable.
When contacting that many districts and only 85 out of 13,800 actually complete the survey, they’re likely pre-selecting for districts convinced their policies mattered. And only 61 of the 85 consistently reported data that could be used for their results.
But don’t worry, it gets so, so much worse.
Of the 61 districts where the results were tracked, the breakdown of forced vs optional masking was unbelievably lopsided.
I mean, really, REALLY lopsided:
Out of 61 school districts included — 6 were mask optional. Less than 10%.
How is that remotely useful? These aren’t comparable data sets. It’s not balanced, 30 vs. 30, for example.
But it gets worse. So, so much worse.
[clip]
However, CDC guidance on contact tracing instructs schools to treat masked interactions very differently. If districts followed that guidance, masked students who were within 3-6 feet of masked, COVID positive students are not classified as a “close contact.”
Because the CDC assumes mask work (lol), they specifically instructed schools to treat possible transmission between two masked students differently, leading to contact tracers potentially mislabeling those who wore masks as “primary” infections.
By wearing a mask, you are no longer a “close contact” of another infected student who also wore a mask. How the CDC managed to justify that policy should be grounds for an entire psychological study in and of itself, but it’s virtually impossible to overstate how much of an impact that could have in contact tracing data among these schools.
