SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — A couple of parents of Sarasota County students are suing the school district over the mask requirement.
The lawsuit makes several medical claims that we wanted to verify.
The first claim: “There is not one single instance, anywhere in the entire world where one single school teacher had contracted COVID-19 from a student. Zero cases. Anywhere on planet Earth.”
To verify that claim, we spoke to Dr. Marissa Levine at the University of South Florida. She says information on transmission in schools is still evolving. But one study in Israel pointed to a major outbreak at a high school during a heatwave back in May.
Students were allowed to remove their masks and air conditioning may have spread the virus. Ultimately, 153 students and 25 staff were infected. Doctors traced the infections back to two documented cases, so we can verify there have been cases linked between students and teachers.
Additionally, all the health department representatives at the state and local levels here in Florida say they can't comment on any ongoing or specific epidemiological investigations citing Florida law, so they won't tell us if any contact tracing has revealed whether students have passed it along to teachers. 10 Tampa Bay also contacted the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about contact tracing in schools but we have not yet received any information.
Second, the lawsuit claims: “… the SCSB has instituted a policy of required facemask wear for students in order to attend schools that serves no compelling, let alone, rational purpose when analyzed through the prism of the actual science with respect to COVID-19 and in comparison, to the potential harm to students that will be incurred if this policy of required long-term facemask wear is implemented.”
Health experts say there is a compelling purpose to wearing a mask. The CDC's website points to how wearing a mask protects others and in turn, their mask protects you.
USF Epidemiologist Dr. Jill Roberts recently told 10 Tampa Bay that "mask-wearing is just absolutely huge.” She says there's a higher risk for COVID-19 exposure in the classroom because kids and teachers are there for longer than 15 minutes.
Several other health experts have told school boards in our area that wearing masks is one of our primary defensive tools and has helped contribute to our lower rates of positivity, so science does show wearing a mask makes a difference.
Here's the third claim we checked out: “The SCSB contemplates requiring children, as young as five years of age to wear facemasks up to seven hours a day, five days a week in spite of little to no scientific evidence to support that these same individuals are susceptible of spreading the COVID-19 pandemic.”
While it was originally thought that kids didn't play a significant role in the transmission of the virus, an article published in American Medical Association Pediatrics before school started shows kids have the same viral load as adults which concerns pediatricians.
The Chief of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, Dr. Allison Messina told us, “Younger kids do have the virus and maybe even at great number, and that can mean they may have the ability to transmit it just as well.”
“The issue of viral load in children being high when they're asymptomatic is very important and I think, if anything, this should convince people that everyone needs to be wearing a mask because you just never know," she said.
The study showed young children infected with COVID-19 had between 10 and 100 times more virus in their nose and throat, leaving some doctors to conclude children could potentially initiate super-spreader events in schools.
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