On the same day that New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut announce plans to end their school mask mandates, a federal judge has ruled that Perkiomen Valley School District in Montgomery County can no longer decide its own mask policy. The 60-page decision from the Obama-appointed judge decrees from on high that the PVSD Board of Directors are not to loosen up the masking requirement until the Court says so.
Against this backdrop, I decided to take a look at whether or not the radical difference in masking policies has substantially affected COVID outcomes between Bucks County and Montgomery County. As all of you already know, I have been collecting data from the Bucks County COVID Map all school year which clearly shows that mask requirements have made zero difference within Bucks County school districts. You can read more about that effort here: The Charts.
While the Bucks County data is compelling, what about a direct comparison between Bucks and Montgomery County? What about a direct comparison of their school-age populations, specifically?
Since the PA Supreme Court ruled that the school masking order was illegal, 8 of 13 Bucks County school districts have been mask optional. Those 8 mask-optional districts account for 76% of all Bucks County public school students.
Montgomery County districts have all maintained strict mask requirements, the sole exception being Souderton Area School District which went optional in January. So only about 5% of Montgomery County public school students currently go to school in a mask optional setting.
Despite this massive difference, 76% vs. 5%, the chart below shows that all throughout the school year, including the last two months since the Supreme Court decision, Bucks and Montgomery counties have had identical COVID rates. Absolutely identical.
The data for this chart comes straight from the PA Department of Health, in the form of weekly reports on pediatric COVID-19 cases among counties. The PADoH provides pediatric case counts for 0-4 year-olds and 5-18 year-olds, separately, and I am using the 5-18 year-old data as this is the school-age population. Every weekly report can be found at the bottom this page.
To highlight just how similar Bucks and Montgomery counties have been in terms of COVID prevalence amongst their school-age populations, check out this chart which shows the exact same data but includes all Pennsylvania counties.
What you see here is that Pennsylvania counties have a pretty wide variance in pediatric COVID rates, and Bucks County (green line) is pretty low compared to the rest. The orange lines are the other 8 Southeastern PA counties (Berks, Chester, Delaware, Lancaster, Lehigh, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia). The black line is the Pennsylvania state average.
Consider that amongst that very wide variance, Bucks and Montgomery wound up experiencing the exact same total pediatric COVID prevalence, despite massive differences in school mask requirements.
The data couldn’t possibly be any clearer: these mask requirements are having no effect on COVID prevalence.
Source Data:
