> Why are you ignoring the multiple times I've talked about the effects that aren't directly related to the children? They're carriers too, and that matters, on top of everything else.

How is posting that exact thing—so, agreeing with you—more explicitly ("to protect other people in and connected to schools and students, to reduce community rates of infection") than you have until this very post (it's at best implied in all your other posts, from what I can tell, and I just re-read them to be sure—but maybe you had that on your mind and it just didn't come across strongly?) ignoring that point? It's far and away the strongest argument for masking in schools.

> And the institutions I trust do not agree with you that we're "rapidly approaching" any such loss of value from masking in schools. That's just straight up wrong.

We better be, because I'm pretty sure they're going away before long no matter what either of us want (again, barring a large change in course for the pandemic). Shit, around here they already did drop them for a couple weeks right before the Omicron surge and schools had to scramble to bring them back to avoid having to shut down completely (again: man, I hate the insistence on removing safety measures ASAP, it's been proven a stupid idea every single time it's happened so far in my city, yet people, including e.g. school administrators, keep going "OK looks better this week, we should start removing our safety measures"). Our city-wide mandates are currently gone and were being largely ignored for about a month before they were removed. It borders on miraculous that schools have been successful at keeping mandates in place as long and consistently as they have—and if not for the fact that they'd have ended up horrendously under-staffed and had to shut down without them, I absolutely don't think they'd have worked as hard at it as they have. Admin hates pissing off parents, even if it's only a few of them, and the anti-maskers have been the angriest and most-active participants in these goings-on. From what I can see the (very credible) threat of mass teacher resignations and walk-outs (plus, you know, just the risk of too many of them being sick at once) are the only reason mask mandates in schools persisted for any amount of time at all (and, again, I'm glad they have!) outside maybe the "bluest" of "blue" strongholds, but I don't think that pressure's gonna keep up much longer.

The high school in my conservative county has reinstated mask mandates, and it hasn't really been very dramatic at all. Most parents generally get it, but I live in a flyover state so nobody cares that it's working fine here.

Yeah, they all kinda had to with Omicron because it's so damn contagious that even with the reduced 5-day quarantine guidelines and drastic reductions in the circumstances under which one must quarantine (which changes I'm about 90% sure are BS from a pure public health perspective, and just a practical-minded compromise aimed at preventing a de facto shutdown from having half the damn country in quarantine at once in the Omicron surge) some local districts were seeing days when they were short hundreds of subs to cover for all the teachers who were out.

[EDIT] BTW, no hard feelings, I genuinely wasn't trying to piss you off. Communication is hard. Sorry if it sucked this time. [EDIT EDIT] LOL, and that phrasing was too wishy-washy. Sorry if I sucked at it, this time.

I'm just sick of giving an inch to evil people and watching them take a mile. I'm done doing it, even if it makes me sound like an ass as a result.