Letters to the Editor

NewCanaanite.com recently received the following letter(s) to the editor. Please send letters to editor@newcanaanite.com for publication here.

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I’m a parent with two children in New Canaan Public Schools who attended the public meeting last week over whether to continue requiring masks in our schools.  What a mess.  Aside from the vitriol being spewed at our local officials there was something more disturbing at play, a lack of a common set of facts and a common goal — to keep our schools open.

I was alarmed by how many speakers claimed the pandemic was over, mostly because they wanted it to be. I imagine everyone would like the pandemic to end, but wanting it to doesn’t make it so.  It’s true that Gov. Ned Lamont and Gov. Phil Murphy are ending their requirements for mandatory masking in schools.  It’s also true that the risks of death or serious illness and hospitalization in a highly vaccinated population appears to be much lower in this wave than previous ones.  But America currently has the highest per capita death rate of any of our wealthy peers: a daily average of 2,600 and 120,000 hospitalizations.  These numbers would once have been completely unacceptable, and I fear we are now normalizing them.

And despite what many people think, New Canaan is not a fortress.  The Omicron variant is extremely infectious and still disruptive.  Other countries further along in the wave are not seeing cases drop as low as they had before.  Only about a third of Fairfield County is boosted, and people enter and leave town every day and travel to virus hotspots during school vacations.  Winter break begins next week, Spring Break isn’t far behind. There’s a strong possibility that case numbers will rise again.

Masking, despite not being implemented properly, has been effective in reducing the virus’ spread. Many speakers cited studies saying it wasn’t, but I have no idea if those studies represent a scientific consensus.  Frankly, I don’t feel qualified or comfortable evaluating the science on masking.  But what surprises me is how strongly the other parents felt themselves to be.  Both nationally and here at the state level we have highly qualified experts within a public health system that evaluate data from many more sources than we in the public have access to.  They also have to factor in risks beyond what we may be feeling here in New Canaan.  They might not give us the answers we’d like, but that doesn’t make them any less qualified or rigorous in their decision-making.

There may come a time when it becomes entirely prudent to reduce our vigilance against the virus.  I hope that day comes soon. But to determine when that comes, we should rely on public health expertise, not a group of loud “armchair scientists” or the Fox News pundits they listen to. Nor should we rely on Dr. Harvey Risch, the misleading scientist Sen. Tom O’Dea presented via video the other night.  While he is an epidemiologist of cancer, not an epidemiologist of infectious diseases, so his expertise has little to no bearing on issues relating to COVID.  Not only that, he [Risch] has spoken out against vaccines and advocated for the thoroughly debunked hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as remedies for treating COVID, a position that gets other medical professionals fired.

And here’s the other dismaying element from the other night: not having the right goal. People’s anger was disproportionately aimed not at the virus, but at the very weapons we have to fight it.  Masking was portrayed by parents as a negative; something that punished them and their children, rather than something that rewarded them and their schoolmates, teachers and administrators with the opportunity to keep their schools open.  They saw masking as a violation of their “personal liberty,” rather than as my children do: an act of solidarity to stop the spread of this virus both here in town and beyond our borders.

One man quoted Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death.” My immediate thought was, “if we give you your liberty, you might give me or someone else death, and where’s the liberty in that?” Let me put it another way: I genuinely don’t enjoy stopping at stop signs.  But I do it, because what would happen if we all didn’t stop?

I also heard little in the way of suggested alternatives to masking. If we do away with it, what’s the alternative? If students do become infectious, the number of contacts they’re likely to have had in an unmasked school environment are exponentially higher.  Many more students are going to need to quarantine and school remotely, which is surely worse than attending school masked. There are other measures, however, that in the absence of masks could minimize infection in classrooms, measures such as ventilation upgrades and CO2 monitors. But I didn’t hear any demands for such alternatives or even a desire to arrive at some sort of scientifically sound answer to when we should de-mask or when we should mask up again. Instead, I heard people interested in one answer, along the lines of, “I’m done, so the pandemic is done.” I wonder what a hospital worker might say to that, or the vast majority of teachers who expose themselves to the virus by interacting with students and colleagues all day long.

It makes me wonder whether any mitigation measure would be acceptable to this crowd. There are some of us who want to fight a war against the virus, and too many others who want to give up that fight and live with it.  So while many of us are storming the beaches at Normandy, others have refused to leave the boats, complaining they don’t want to get wet and that maybe living with the Germans wouldn’t be so bad after all.  I wonder if our war heroes, many of whom are honored at memorials around town, would have said “I’m done,” on the battlefield, and would have so conflated personal inconvenience with sacrifice for the common good?  Because it’s not about your “personal risk tolerance,” it’s about the welfare of others you might spread the virus to, it’s about the illness and inflation and supply chain disruption that can result and that we all complain about.

It leads me to question whether all the anger and the hyperbolic language of trauma about masking is really being presented in good faith, or whether it is ultimately about masking at all. The performances the other night (many of which would have made even some daytime TV hosts blush) can’t be taken out of context: thousands of angry anti-mask meetings have been held around the country for months, many linked to partisan political efforts.  The organizers behind this latest local anti-mask showing have been beating the same drum in town since 2020, long before vaccines were available and the Omicron wave proved to be milder in severity.  So, if they felt the same way about masks back then, do they really have our children’s best interests at heart now?

Some of these same people led a dirty campaign to elect highly partisan candidates for the Board of Ed who made getting rid of masks one of their campaign pledges. But is getting rid of mandatory masking the only item on their agenda?  We’ve seen them attack the expertise and reputations of school administrators, attempt to strip their authority, and set about to destroy district morale.  Being anti-mask appears to be the smoke to hide the real fire they’re starting, from how we teach our history, how diverse our school employees are and whether some ideas and books are too radical for student consumption, except for theirs.

A generous interpretation of all this rancor would be that this is a tremendous waste of energy.  Instead of coming up with ways to truly end this pandemic, keep our schools open and our students sharp, this vocal group is taking every bad experience and frustration their children have had over the last two years and blamed it on masks.

There’s a real risk that those who are dead set against masking will eventually drive our highly regarded educational professionals out of the district.  And who would be the real losers then?  Our children.  No one asked for the pandemic, least of all our kids.  But our excellent leadership has kept our schools open thus far, and for the majority of families here in town that has been a gift that we don’t want to jeopardize.  Our kids are happy to have the opportunity to continue to go to school, masks and all, when so many other kids around the country simply cannot.

Drew Magratten