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To whom this will concern and Dear School Board Members:
I’m not going to be able to join you for the upcoming school board meeting. I wanted to give you what would be my public comments. If one of you would read them, I’d be honored.
The CDC has recommended in light of the Delta variant of the coronavirus that all people regardless of vaccination status wear masks when in schools. When you look at the percentages of vaccinated students in eligible age groups, Cook County’s numbers don’t look good. From ages 12-17 only about 50% of the students have been vaccinated with at least one dose as of this week. Because none of the kids under 12 are eligible for the vaccine, the majority of students at our school are unvaccinated and subject to the worst this virus can do.
While the word on the street would have you believe that kids don’t suffer from this disease, that’s simply untrue. Tragically, Minnesotan kids have died from covid, and pediatric hospitals are full and kids are dying in areas being struck by delta as we meet tonight.
Because this virus is new and has only been with us for under two years, we still don’t know the full longterm effects of this virus. As more studies emerge, covid looks more like a neurological disease than a respiratory disease. That helps explain long covid where people suffer various symptoms after the initial infection.
According to the CDC, long covid is an issue with approximately 1/3 of infected people including kids. There are many examples of otherwise healthy kids who had minor cases of covid, who later had issues such as the inability to walk, extreme fatigue, concussion like symptoms or adult teeth falling out due to nerve damage from the disease. In the long-term because this is a new virus, we don’t know if our kids who caught the disease will have permanent neurological damage.
It’s not a risk that is worthwhile to take when a simple risk mitigation strategy exists.
That mitigation strategy is universal mask wearing. With universal mask wearing, according to Dr. Richard Corsi, President of the Academy of Fellows of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, with masks that are only 40% effective, you get 64% reduction in potential covid inhalation dose when everyone is masked. With masks that show 80% effectiveness, you get a 96% reduction. That’s without ventilation and distancing risk mitigation strategies. With those, you reduce the risk even further.
I know that you are going to hear from parents claiming a constitutional freedom not to wear masks in school. To those parents, I would remind them of what Jefferson and his contemporaries believed the phrase “Pursuit of Happiness” in our Declaration of Independence meant. The pursuit of happiness isn’t some momentary individual pleasure of not having to put a mask on, but a much deeper unalienable right of happiness for all the citizens of the country. An example of such a right is taking actions to make sure as many American citizens as possible feel the happiness of being healthy. That extends to our school. All the students and parents have an unalienable right to the happiness in knowing that our school took the best risk mitigation steps to keep our children healthy and safe from long-term damage from this disease. That unalienable right overrides the selfishness of short-term individual pleasure of not having to wear a mask.
Even if you don’t believe freedom means what Jefferson and the other founders believed, the numbers show that universal mask wearing is a worthwhile covid risk mitigation strategy. I hope that our school board will adopt it for the first semester and revisit it after December if the CDC revises their recommendations and our vaccination rates among kids are higher.
Thank you,
Bryan Hansel
Editor’s note: Bryan Hansel is from Grand Marais. This letter was read to the school board at the August 19 school board meeting.
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