Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to CNN’s medical advisor Dr. Leana Wen, kids need weekly testing and continuous wearing of medical grade N95 biological masks to prevent the spread of Covid in schools.
CNN Medical Analyst Wen: Kids Need Weekly Testing, N95 Masks ‘Cloth Masks Are Not Enough’
PAM KEY 10 Aug 2021
CNN medical contributor Dr. Leana Wen said Tuesday on “The Situation Room” that when children return to school, they should wear N95 or at least a three-ply surgical masks and be tested weekly for coronavirus.
Anchor Wolf Blitzer said, “Dr. Wen nearly 94,000 cases of coronavirus in children were reported in the past week alone here in the United States. What is it going to take to get kids back to school safely?”
…
Read more (includes video): https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/08/10/cnn-medical-analyst-wen-kids-need-weekly-testing-n95-masks-cloth-masks-are-not-enough/
I used a P95 mask, an industrial version of the N95 mask, during the outbreak last year in my local area. The idea of wearing such a mask for more than a few hours is utterly absurd, the longest I’ve worn one during a lockdown is half an hour, long enough for a quick dash into the supermarket.
There have been cases of people fainting at the wheel and causing a traffic accident, because they were wearing a N95 mask, presumably due to oxygen deprivation – its a real struggle to breath through a high spec mask, especially if you are doing anything physical. My concern is exactly the same thing could happen to kids, if they are forced to wear high spec masks all day at school.
And there is a real chance wearing a mask does not make any difference to your risk of contracting Covid, the virus is a lot smaller than the 0.3 micron particles the mask is designed to stop. I wore a mask because I hoped it might make a difference, not because I was convinced it would.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
this is a great opportunity to defund the schools & begin to restore education
https://yardsaleofthemind.wordpress.com/education-history-reading-list-preliminary/
Wen is one of the people who spent 18 months saying it was racist to say the virus came from the Wuhan Virology Institute. She is a lying scoundrel.
With a 20 year background in HazMat and hospital based emergency patient decontamination, I have to question the credentials of this Dr. Leana Wen, to make such a casual statement. I doubt she has worn an N95 in years.
Is there any real, objective evidence that mask wearing reduces disease and death from infectious airborne viruses?
Andy, I’ve been asking the same for the past year, and all I’ve ever seen have been models, estimations, and a couple of (rather limited) lab studies (i.e. exhaling through a mask through a hole into a box and using a camera to count the number of droplets). Oh, and a couple of studies specific to N-95’s.
Conversely, all of the real-world studies I’ve seen have shown limited effectiveness at best.
According to some reports, the main strain at the moment is the delta variant which is supposed to be more infectious but much less dangerous. This means that for healthy people and particularly children, there is no problem. If the infection spreads in schools, then herd immunity is around the corner and could even mean the end of vaccine induced Covid variants, since the acquired immunity is not only based on one single spike epitope.
From the article: “CNN Medical Analyst Wen: Kids Need Weekly Testing, N95 Masks ‘Cloth Masks Are Not Enough”
Well, don’t take this as me advocating mandating mask wearing, but the “cloth masks are not enough” is way overdue. The N95 mask will stop the Wuhan virus in some cases. It won’t stop the naked virus, which is a little bit too small, but the virus is usually contained in a water droplet, and the N95 will stop the water droplet, which is larger than the virus itself.
At the beginning of the pandemic there was a shortage of N95 masks, and health workers were given priority, but now they are readily available at Amazon and other places, and if you are going to wear a mask, wear one that might do you some good, which means the N95.
There are also improvements to the N95 coming down the pike that supposedly can block the virus itself from getting through.
And I see a lot of people complaining that having the face blocked by wearing a mask is detrimental to the social development of children because they need to see facial expressions, and I agree. This can be fixed by using N95 masks that are transparent and allow the face to be seen. The Ford Motor Company, among others, is currently manufacturing transparent N95 masks.
From the article: “There have been cases of people fainting at the wheel and causing a traffic accident, because they were wearing a N95 mask, presumably due to oxygen deprivation – its a real struggle to breath through a high spec mask, especially if you are doing anything physical. My concern is exactly the same thing could happen to kids, if they are forced to wear high spec masks all day at school.”
Certain people may have trouble with an N95 mask, but I have been using N95 masks for years when I mow my lawn to prevent me from breathing in all the pollen and other things floating around in the air from the mowing.
I have never noticed any physical problems from using this mask, and I work pretty hard at the push-mowing and my heart and lungs are going at full capacity. Of course, I only wear the mask for about 2 hours (the time it takes for my lawnmower to run out of gas). The only problem I have with the mask is it gets soaked with sweat after a while (about 15 minutes in this high humidity) and then you can’t breath through it. So I have to put on a new, dry one, in those cases.
Wearing the mask all day, every day, would be a big problem. Even for me. 🙂
There is a claim out there that masks, even the cloth masks, have dramatically reduced the flu virus infections since the pandemic.
There is also a claim out there that getting a flu vaccination will help you fight off the Wuhan virus.
And if Pfizer successfully develops their new pill, which is said to be effective against the Wuhan virus and all its strains then we can do away with the masks. This new medicine is due to be available around the end of this year.
And I was heartened by a report I saw the other day, which said that about five percent of children who are infected by the Wuhan virus, symptomatic or unsymptomatic, go on to develop aftereffects from the virus, which discombobulates the immune system even after the virus is out of the body, but it appears that this condition clears up after about eight weeks. My chief worry about the Wuhan virus has been about the aftereffects and how long they persist. This study gives hope that the aftereffects are shortlived in children.
Again, I’m not advocating mandatory mask wearing, but if a mask is to be worn, it should be an N95.
With weekly testing false positives are essentially guaranteed as no test is 100%. If the policy for a positive result is to close the classroom (or school) for 10/14 days then they might as well not open the school – the choice to test becomes a choice to close.
If the policy response is to send the just the positive individual home, then one wonders how effective that would be given the likely exposure of their classmates if indeed they were positive.
Even immediate re-testing to try and rule out false positives will return a double false positive often enough at the scale of a school (hundreds) and proposed frequency (weekly) to make the strategy useless.
It’s a difficult conundrum for sure, balancing risk of spread with the benefits of learning and socializing.
I think the best solution is to do surveillance testing and only consider results at the school or other relevant population level. If we expect 1% false positives (optimistic) based on previous test performance, then we select a relevant risk threshold for when the next escalation of policy is implemented – for example a 3% positive rate from an adequate sample size.
mask with 3 layers one being ultrafine grade poly med fabric made for myself
well it prob worked better but i couldnt breathe well
since mask mandate hit vic for ALL outside home travels my sinuses are bad and Im using an inhaler sporadically
bloody stupid idea theyre ok for stopping your own cough sneeze spreading as much
thats about all
This mask wearing is blatant abuse of children.I would doubt Dr Wen has ever worn a N95 mask as she would not otherwise be promoting its use in children as she describes.Sweden has not locked their schools once since the start of the pandemic and the teaching profession has one of the lowest incidences of Covid of all.As well,children have a greater chance of death and illness,albeit small, from the flu, for which no special measures are suggested of course.
As an aside,we have no long term data for the new gene technology vaccines ,as we do have for the old technology influenza vaccines,and therefore Covid vaccination for children up to 16 (at least) should not proceed as a risk/benefit analysis is totally unknown.The risk is unknown and we cannot quantify any benefit which may ensue from vaccination.
To vaccinate children to protect the vulnerable ,would be a “first” in vaccinology.
As in the field of climate science,there is a lot of scientism out there.
Idiots abound out there. As the young do not get Covid, why all the precautions. It’s to train them to be compliant sheeple for when more restrictions are imposed by the Communist in the WH.
Our governments at every level have abdicated their responsibilities in the face of this virus. It just demonstrates how useless they are as they hide behind the medical experts when the resulting decisions have massive implications that go well beyond whet the medical people are prepared to balance. For the politicians, they see nothing to be gained by making brave, principled or rational decisions. So they just hide behind medical priorities that are extremely limited.
The proper course of action for this epidemic would have been to protect and shelter the elderly and infirm while letting the virus run , particularly in the schools. Masks and social distancing may have been helpful in reducing transmission and an overload of our health care facilities, but even that is somewhat doubtful.
The legacy of this is decades of debt repayment and inflation, increased drug and suicide deaths and extended damage to the economy that does more harm than the virus ever did.
The last 60 years has ben about discovering the vast no man’s land beyond what government can do effectively. Science is likewise out there.
Well, N95 masks should be worn at certain times in Wood Shop, not that anyone at CNN ever went to Wood Shop.
masks dont work to stop respiratory viruses…. not even n95… check the following study done waaaaaaayyyy back in september 2019
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2749214/
I had to wear an N95 mask to finish painting my house due to smoke from wildfires in 2018. I would paint for half an hour, then go in the house, BREATHE and recover so I could return to painting. It was very uncomfortable, but necessary due to the smoke in the air. To wear those masks for schooling? That sounds like abuse to me. I wouldn’t send a child to school if the masks required were N95.
I’m guessing, too, that no one is going to check the masks for fit like they do in a hospital. The kids will wear whatever their parents put on them. Fit is a vital part of the mask function, so one has already rendered the mask less than optimal by not properly fitting it.
Graphene coated mask anyone?
During Army Basic Training in 1981, we hade a 20 mile road march in full NBC (Nuclear/Biological/Chemical) gear. Obviously that meant gas masks as well. This was in July in Kentucky (Ft Knox). It was pure hell.
Now, an N95 mask is nothing like a full gas mask, but unless it’s properly fitted, and you’re not fiddling with it (kids won’t fiddle with their masks, no sirree), it’s worthless.
Forcing children who have practically a zero chance of dying from Covid is child abuse. Every parent should threaten to sue their school board members… and actually do it.