Posted ,
Reading 2 mins.
in collaboration with
Dr Gérald Kierzek (Medical Director of Doctissimo)
A new study highlights the link between wearing a mask at school and the incidence rate of Covid-19. Result: the mask would have no use in limiting transmissions at school.
Often decried, wearing a mask at school would ultimately be useless. This is the observation made by Spanish researchers in a recent study published in the journal Social Science Research Network (SSRN). According to them, wearing a mask at school would not be linked to a lower transmission of Covid-19.
A question of age rather than mask
To carry out the study, the researchers based themselves on children aged between three and eleven years old and educated in a Catalan school. The analyzes were established according to the classes, ranging from kindergarten where the wearing of the mask was not imposed to primary school, in which the wearing of the mask was compulsory.
After identifying the incidence and transmission rate, the researchers came to the conclusion that the incidence rate was significantly lower in kindergarten where the mask was not compulsory than in primary school. According to them, the transmission of Covid-19 would depend more on the age of the children than on the wearing of the mask. “In conclusion, mask-wearing mandates in schools were not associated with a decline in SARS-CoV-2. Conversely, we found lower incidence and transmission in younger children (without a mask-wearing mandate at school), suggesting that age is the most important component to explain transmission in young children. children”, can we read in the results of the study.
“Children misuse the mask”
For Dr Gérald Kierzek, emergency physician and medical director of Doctissimo, the findings of the study are not surprising: “on the children’s side there is anyway a problem of port, impossible to position correctly, not to touch it and therefore badly used”.
Even if the end of wearing a mask in school is decreed from March 14, a question persists on the side of the doctor: “until when ?”. “The real challenge is not to reintroduce these measures, but to stop them definitively if they are ineffective.”, he underlines. “We clearly saw with the Omicron variant that the contaminations took place despite the mask. It would then be fundamental to have a scientific evaluation of the barrier gestures that work or not, to finally have measures decided on their real medical interest and not on the effects of announcements or communication..