Philly Dept. of Public Health an Agency Holding Tightly to Masking in K-12
The CDC is now giving optional mask guidance for counties with “Medium” Covid19 levels like Philadelphia. The CHOP Policy Lab last month recommending making masking of students optional. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health and its decider Dr. Cheryl Bettigole are holding their own in maintaining the order that Schools in the city force compliance of masking on all students.
Children in K-12 are little impacted by Sars-CoV-2 infections, The majority are thought to have already contracted it, says the CDC, and if sickened face less severity of illness than if stricken with the seasonal flu or common cold.
In Thursday’s Board of Public Health meeting Bettigole said she would revisit her order for K-12 students in a couple of weeks. Many suburban school districts surrounding Philadelphia dropped their mask mandates this week and many others had started the new year mask optional.
It appears that the effort to increase vaccination rates in children, particularly in black children 5-11 is the primary motivation for keeping the mask mandate.
Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of pediatric compliance in the US with Covid19 vaccination in the 5-11 year old group. 53% of these children are reported as fully vaccinated. However, Blacks are at 22.8% and Latino’s have reached 29.8% in what the Board of Health presented as troubling information.
Why the Philadelphia Department of Public health desires to keep pushing the potentially life threaten experimental therapy on the city’s children is the biggest question this city and likely its courts will be needing to answer in 2022.
Concerning the three threat levels Bettigole developed, without consultation with her Board, that would enable her to reopen/close the city and add or remove restrictions, Bettigole stated in the meeting on Thrusday “We tried to tie this to CDC metrics as much as we could”.
So we will see what culminates politically next week. It was revealed on Friday that Impact Research, the Democratic polling and strategy firm, had distributed talking points to all party apparatchiks that advises “Declare the crisis phase over and push for feeling and acting more normal”.
Bettigole must have thought her new positions were being positive and forward looking stating “Right now we are in pretty good shape”. She added “I think it is important to recognize when we are in pretty good shape and do let people have a little bit of freedom then”. Here is a link to the meeting’s recording. Go to 50:47 to hear her comments on people’s freedom.