Florida Ag Commissioner’s analysis of school COVID-19 cases suggests mask mandates work

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Before Thursday’s ballot by the authorities Board of Education connected schoolhouse disguise mandates, Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried held an lawsuit to accidental disguise mandates successful schools bash enactment and that she had compiled lawsuit numbers from 33 schoolhouse districts to beryllium it.

The information compiled by Fried comes from 33 section schoolhouse territory dashboards.

She said districts without disguise mandates had 3.5 times arsenic galore cases arsenic those that required masks from the start.

“This is indisputable grounds arsenic if we already didn’t know, that masks work,” said Fried.

Our investigation of the 30 districts with implicit information sets, recovered 4.7 percent of students contracted COVID since the commencement of the schoolhouse twelvemonth successful districts with nary disguise mandate oregon that allowed parents to opt-out.

That’s compared to 2.2 percent successful districts with strict disguise mandates.

The numbers suggest disguise mandates chopped lawsuit rates successful half.

There are 2.7 cardinal students successful the state.

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Taking our findings to their logical extreme, astir 127,000 students would person gotten COVID if determination were nary schoolhouse disguise mandates astatine all, compared to lone astir 60,000 if determination had been a cosmopolitan disguise mandate.

“Ron DeSantis is lying to you astir masks successful schools,” said Fried.

But the Governor’s Office called the reliability of Fried’s information into question, pointing retired there’s nary mode of verifying whether reported infections happened wrong a school.

They noted that the information doesn’t set for vaccination rates, erstwhile corruption rates, oregon assemblage corruption rates.

The Governor’s Office besides highlighted that caller cases among school-aged children and cases reported by districts person fallen drastically since schoolhouse started.

The diminution has been virtually identical careless of schoolhouse territory masking policies.

We requested a afloat examination of COVID corruption rates successful each 67 schoolhouse districts from the Governor’s Office, but we person truthful acold not received the data.

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