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How Middle and High School Students Wear Their Face Masks in Classrooms and School Buildings

In addition to other mitigation measures, face masks have been used in schools worldwide as a precondition for allowing school attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The quality and habits of mask wearing have, however, not been evaluated thus far, leaving uncertainty about the efficacy of this me...

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Autores principales: Jarnig, Gerald, Kerbl, Reinhold, van Poppel, Mireille N. M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9498795/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36141253
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10091641
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author Jarnig, Gerald
Kerbl, Reinhold
van Poppel, Mireille N. M.
author_facet Jarnig, Gerald
Kerbl, Reinhold
van Poppel, Mireille N. M.
author_sort Jarnig, Gerald
collection PubMed
description In addition to other mitigation measures, face masks have been used in schools worldwide as a precondition for allowing school attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The quality and habits of mask wearing have, however, not been evaluated thus far, leaving uncertainty about the efficacy of this measure. It was the aim of this study to assess the accuracy of face mask wearing by children and adolescents in different school situations. In May and June 2022, students of two selected Austrian schools were asked to provide information about the different variations in wearing a face mask in different situations at school (in classrooms with or without the presence of a teacher, and in school buildings outside classrooms without the presence of a teacher). Strongly divergent results were identified for the amount of time in which face masks were worn correctly in the three different situations (p < 0.001, eta = 0.29). In the presence of a teacher, masks were worn correctly 63.7% of the time, while this percentage decreased to 31.9% when no teacher was present (p < 0.001). These results suggest the limited efficacy of mandatory face masks in schools. Should this measure become necessary again in the future due to the pandemic situation and highly pathogenic variants, special efforts are necessary in order to improve the quality of face mask wearing by school children.
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spelling pubmed-94987952022-09-23 How Middle and High School Students Wear Their Face Masks in Classrooms and School Buildings Jarnig, Gerald Kerbl, Reinhold van Poppel, Mireille N. M. Healthcare (Basel) Article In addition to other mitigation measures, face masks have been used in schools worldwide as a precondition for allowing school attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The quality and habits of mask wearing have, however, not been evaluated thus far, leaving uncertainty about the efficacy of this measure. It was the aim of this study to assess the accuracy of face mask wearing by children and adolescents in different school situations. In May and June 2022, students of two selected Austrian schools were asked to provide information about the different variations in wearing a face mask in different situations at school (in classrooms with or without the presence of a teacher, and in school buildings outside classrooms without the presence of a teacher). Strongly divergent results were identified for the amount of time in which face masks were worn correctly in the three different situations (p < 0.001, eta = 0.29). In the presence of a teacher, masks were worn correctly 63.7% of the time, while this percentage decreased to 31.9% when no teacher was present (p < 0.001). These results suggest the limited efficacy of mandatory face masks in schools. Should this measure become necessary again in the future due to the pandemic situation and highly pathogenic variants, special efforts are necessary in order to improve the quality of face mask wearing by school children. MDPI 2022-08-28 /pmc/articles/PMC9498795/ /pubmed/36141253 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10091641 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Jarnig, Gerald
Kerbl, Reinhold
van Poppel, Mireille N. M.
How Middle and High School Students Wear Their Face Masks in Classrooms and School Buildings
title How Middle and High School Students Wear Their Face Masks in Classrooms and School Buildings
title_full How Middle and High School Students Wear Their Face Masks in Classrooms and School Buildings
title_fullStr How Middle and High School Students Wear Their Face Masks in Classrooms and School Buildings
title_full_unstemmed How Middle and High School Students Wear Their Face Masks in Classrooms and School Buildings
title_short How Middle and High School Students Wear Their Face Masks in Classrooms and School Buildings
title_sort how middle and high school students wear their face masks in classrooms and school buildings
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9498795/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36141253
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10091641
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