"they ignored important factors like varying vaccination rates; and they counted outbreaks instead of cases."
As masks are supposed to lower outbreaks - focusing on outbreaks makes sense to me.
As masks are supposed to lower outbreaks - focusing on outbreaks makes sense to me.
However, you seem to have stopped reading the Atlantic article after sentence you took out of context. "The authors defined an outbreak as being two or more COVID-19 cases among students or staff members at a school within a 14-day period that are epidemiologically linked. “The measure of two cases in a school is problematic,” Louise-Anne McNutt, a former Epidemic Intelligence Service officer for the CDC and an epidemiologist at the State University of New York at Albany, told me. “It doesn’t tell us that transmission occurred in school.” She pointed to the fact that, according to Maricopa County guidelines, students are considered “close contacts” of an infected student—and thus subject to potential testing and quarantine—only if they (or that infected student) were unmasked. As a result, students in Maricopa schools with mask mandates may have been less likely than students in schools without mandates to get tested following an initial exposure. This creates what’s known as a detection bias, she said, which could grossly affect the study’s findings. (Jehn and McCullough called it “highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students.”) McNutt believes that masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the Arizona study doesn’t answer the specific question it purports to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."
No, it's in the Atlantic article specifically linked in the Reason.com article. I'd suggest reading that since the entire thing is based off of it.
>In fact, it would have made no difference tracking cases because of school district's policy of testing only 'unmasked' individuals.
You may want to reread this part...
This creates what’s known as a detection bias, she said, which could grossly affect the study’s findings. (Jehn and McCullough called it “highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students.”) McNutt believes that masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the Arizona study doesn’t answer the specific question it purports to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."