You requested. I obliged...so here is a scintillating and riveting blog about the hazards and benefits of children wearing masks at school. I know what you want me to say. Believe me, I do. I really know. After all, I have two sons in primary school who just love wearing masks all day. Sorry to disappoint you, but no can do. Little Johnny is just going to have to suck it up (probably inappropriate use of slang there considering we're talking about masks) for the duration of school.
This is what is going to happen:
Little Johnny will get grumpy and irritated and play with his mask all day
Little Johnny will moan every morning about wearing a mask. For the entire trip to school. And probably on the way home too.
Little Johnny's teacher (bless her) will want to pull her hair out in frustration after telling little Johnny for the tenth time in fifteen minutes to put his mask back on.
Little Johnny may get some skin irritation if you buy him a cheap mask made of poor quality material and, horror of horrors, may get some pimples.
Like children all over world, little Johnny will eventually stop noticing he is wearing a mask and may even start feeling strange going out without a mask on.
This is what is not going to happen:
Little Johnny will not die of carbon dioxide poisoning. In fact, little Johnny will unlikely suffer any effects of carbon dioxide inhalation unless you have bought a really strange face mask for him (like a plastic one, in which case there are some serious questions I need to ask you) or for some reason actually taped his mask to his face.
Little Johnny will not spread his virus to his friends when he laughs, coughs or sneezes
Perhaps it would be helpful here to point out that there are different types of face masks that serve different purposes. The very tight N95-type masks can be very uncomfortable, but they are not the mask recommended for children to wear to school. They are mainly for healthcare providers who are performing high risk procedures such as intubating patients, during which they will be exposed to high aerosolised viral loads. Those masks are protective to the wearer and the bystander. The cloth masks that are recommended for school are much looser and, although they shouldn't be falling off little Johnny's face, they really shouldn't be suffocating him. If they are, perhaps it's time to look at a different mask. The cloth masks recommended for school use are not particularly for your child's protection, but rather for the protection of those around him/her. I've tried to think of various ways to try to explain this to people and unfortunately the most effective way is pretty crude, so I'm going to apologise in advance if I offend anyone. Sensitive readers are advised to skip the next paragraph. On the flip-side, this really hit home with my 10 and 12 year old sons...
Imagine changing a baby's nappy. As you open the diaper, very little Johnny decides to pee. You aren't wearing any protective clothing (mainly because you aren't a weird psycho mother) and so you get covered in pee. Imagine the same scenario if, at the very moment that very little Johnny starts to pee, you realise what is happening and manage to cover his delicate nether regions with a towel. Voila! You do not need to go and bath and change your clothing. Here's where it gets a bit weird...but hypothetically just imagine that for some reason you were to spill the same volume of water on diaperless very little johnny but managed to get the towel in place before the water spilt on him. Little Johnny would be less wet than without the towel but he certainly wouldn't be dry. Cloth masks are like the towel. They are not for your own protection: they protect the people around you.
Let me say that again. Wearing a cloth mask to school is not for little Johnny's protection. It's to protect little Johnny's friends and teachers from his germs. When little Johnny sneezes or coughs or laughs, his mask protects (to some degree) those around him*. It also can mean little johnny has snot smeared on his face for the next few hours, so perhaps pack a change of mask for school.
On a slightly more serious and scientific note, there is increasing evidence coming out of recent studies to show that there is very likely to be some aerosol spread of the novel coronavirus, which makes mask-wearing all the more important. There's also the legal aspect, but I wont go into that because I'm neither a lawyer nor a politician.
I know it's a hack. Flip, the first thing I do when I reach the relative privacy of my car is to rip my mask from my face. Masks are unnatural, they are uncomfortable and they engender massive feelings of claustrophobia. I certainly don't want to wear a mask, which makes it even more difficult to try to persuade my children to. Right now, I've told them to try to think of wearing their masks as doing a good deed for the day.
*On a side note, for all those people who a)think they are being huge rebels and bucking the system by not wearing a mask or b)run around mask-less proclaiming that they are letting their immune system do it's job: you're just actually being a selfish git.
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