School Policy COVID-19 Mitigation Strategies Work: Expert

WISCONSIN — As parents and school boards deliberate the value of mask mandates in schools, an infectious diseases expert said that people should continue taking precautions to reduce COVID-19 outbreaks in classrooms and in the rest of Wisconsin.

Some school districts, such as the School District in Mondovi in Buffalo, voted to require masks in schools after a 17-year-old student died after testing positive for the coronavirus.

Two parents, with the support of a Minocqua brewery, have sued school districts in Waukesha and Fall Creek in an attempt to force masking in classes.

Parents and decision-makers disagree on the threat COVID-19 poses and how to mitigate the spread of infection, but collective action to reduce transmission — such as masking and getting vaccinated — gives people more control over the pandemic, infectious disease expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor, Ajay Sethi, told Patch.

“The indoor environment is riskier for the spread of COVID-19 among people,” Sethi said. “We also have to think of classrooms where kids under 12 years of age who aren’t eligible to be vaccinated [have] greater vulnerability than kids between 12 and 18.”

Kirk Bangstad, the owner of the Minocqua brewery supporting the two lawsuits against school districts, told Patch that his goal was to get a judge to force schools boards to mask kids who were too young to get vaccinated.

“Transmission can occur among people who are vaccinated, but when people are vaccinated the course of the illness is lessened,” Sethi said. “But for kids under 12, this is a population that is at much higher risk of contracting the virus and continuing its spread.”

Mask mandates are useful in classes where kids can easily infect each other, but it has become a point of tension for parents, school board members and policymakers. “I think all adults want a society where children are safe and recognize there’s different perceptions out there on what the virus does to kids,” Sethi said. “If you can come to some agreement of what shared values are, recognize [mandates] are pretty much temporary.”

When people have more control over the spread of the virus, they may see mandates lifted in the future.

“It can be challenging to understand the benefits of taking precautions because taking precautions reduces the risk of transmission,” Sethi said. “It’s not until you lift precautions when you realize that lifting those precautions led to more outbreaks that you fully understand that those precautions were good to begin with.”

People can gain some immunity from being naturally infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, but immune response ranges widely among people, Sethi said. A vaccination can provide enough of an immune response in most people to protect them more reliably.

“When there’s collective action to reducing transmission of this virus and our community, not just in K-12 but all other parts of our life and our living, and to promote vaccination, when we all come together to do that, we really have more control over the pandemic and these kinds of mandates can be lifted,” he said.

See Also:

• Parent Sues Waukesha Schools Over COVID-19, North WI PAC Funds It
• These WI Schools Had To Mandate Masks After COVID-19 Outbreaks