Child Mask Mandates Have No Clear Benefits And Cause Harm, BMJ Review Finds; Why Covid Lockdowns and Mask Mandates Made Children Sicker: It’s No Surprise Respiratory Viruses are Infecting Kids Sheltered by Years of Lockdowns, and other C-Virus related stories

Child Mask Mandates Have No Clear Benefits And Cause Harm, BMJ Review Finds

A new systematic review has been published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, one of the journals of the British Medical Journal, by Sandlund et al. titled ‘Child mask mandates for COVID-19: a systematic review‘.

Since no randomised controlled trials have even been conducted on child mask-wearing or mask mandates, the authors systematically reviewed observational studies and included 22 in the final analysis: six found child mask mandates were associated with lower rates of infection; the other 16 didn’t.

But the studies that found they didn’t weren’t just greater in quantity; they were higher quality too.

Of the six studies reporting a significant negative correlation between masking and COVID-19 cases, five had critical and one had serious ROB [risk of bias].

Of the 16 studies failing to find a significant correlation, one (6.3%) had critical, 10 (62.5%) had serious, five (31.3%) had moderate and none had low ROB. [emphasis added here and below]

In short, almost all studies with critical ROB had pro-mask results, while all studies with moderate ROB did not.

Table 2 below gives a breakdown of the various types of bias the reviewers found. The six studies with pro-mask results are listed first. —>READ MORE HERE

WSJ: Why Covid Lockdowns and Mask Mandates Made Children Sicker:

It’s no surprise respiratory viruses are infecting kids sheltered by years of lockdowns.

Here we go again. The World Health Organization on Nov. 22 said it is looking into media reports of Chinese hospitals overwhelmed by sick children. Chinese authorities attribute the surge to higher circulation of seasonal bugs like the flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. The reports have raised concerns about a potentially novel pathogen spreading in China and renewed suspicions about Beijing’s lack of transparency.

“It is not at all clear when this outbreak started as it would be unusual for so many children to be affected so quickly,” the International Society for Infectious Diseases’ Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases reported.

Yet it isn’t surprising that respiratory viruses—suppressed by nearly three years of Covid lockdowns—would come back with a vengeance in China amid low levels of natural immunity. Children are especially susceptible to bugs their immune systems have never encountered, and there are hundreds of them.

It’s also possible that lockdowns and mask mandates impaired children’s immune development, making them more vulnerable to viruses that usually cause mild cold- and flu-like symptoms. Regardless, China’s crowded hospitals are more evidence that there are far more dangerous pathogens than Covid for children.

Meantime, public-health experts in the U.S. are raising alarms about hospitals being flooded by kids with Covid. A Nov. 21 story in Scientific American claims that children younger than 4 years old have “among the highest rates” of Covid hospital admissions because their parents haven’t gotten them vaccinated.

It’s true that hospitalization rates for young children are currently higher than for adolescents and young adults, but they are significantly lower than for seniors. Yet infants are predominantly being hospitalized—not toddlers—and many are also infected with other, more-dangerous respiratory viruses. Infants younger than six months aren’t eligible for Covid vaccines anyway. —>READ MORE HERE

Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

Best Evidence Shows No Benefit to Child Mask Mandates



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