Now for those of us who possess what seems to be as rare as Jadeite, common sense, the results of this Finnish study came as no great revelation. There was simply no logic to mandating the masking of kids, as well as anyone else quite frankly.

Here is the background to this, in fall 2021, the number of new COVID-19 cases was high globally and in Finland, the delta variant had begun to spread in June, and by the end of July, delta was the dominant variant across the country. At that time, face mask use was recommended nationally in schools in children aged 12 years and over. In some Finnish cities, this recommendation was extended to kids aged 10 and above. At that time our friends at the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that a risk-based approach should be applied to the decision to mask children between ages six and 11 years. The goal of the researchers was to compare COVID-19 incidence among 10–12-year-olds between cities with different recommendations on the use of face masks in schools.

Helsinki (population 661 887) and Turku (population 195 818) were selected for comparison since the baseline incidence in the cities had been similar in August and September 2021. Helsinki implemented the national recommendation on face mask use at schools, while Turku had an extended recommendation that included those 10 years old and above.

At the end of the day, the results between those that were between 10-12 and masked and those that weren’t, were basically the same, and when you compared these results to kids under 10 where there was no masking requirement at all, once again the results and trends were very similar. So bottom line based on this study, masking or not masking doesn’t show any benefit when it comes to reducing contracting and spreading Covid amongst the young. In fact it’s the opposite as masking children has negative impacts in terms of physical health and mental health and development.

I’ve put in the link to the pre-print study which you can download for a full review.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.04.22272833v1