On Tuesday, August 3rd, members of the Holy Cross community received an email from the Holy Cross COVID Core Team announcing a new masking requirement on campus. The school stated that it will require masking indoors at all times from August 16th to “at least” September 10th, when Holy Cross will “re-evaluate Covid conditions in [the] community” and decide if the masking requirement needs to be kept in place. Holy Cross has made this decision based on the guidance of the CDC. That is, in fact, the only reason cited. Nowhere has the school provided data, scientific evidence, or any other justification for this decision. The school’s risk assessment appears to be what the CDC has told them it should be.
The school’s decision to enforce a mask mandate for its vaccinated students is puzzling. What is the logic here? What is the science backing the risk assessment being made? What is the justification for the tradeoffs Holy Cross is asking students to make? The quick answer to that question is, when it comes to the science, there is no justification. COVID-19 was, and still is, a serious threat to unvaccinated individuals. The risk of hospitalization or death — due in large part to extremely high community transmission in the absence of a vaccine — made masking and social distancing critical for protecting our most vulnerable. However, in the presence of a vaccine, the science, data, and everything we are hearing from doctors and hospitals on the ground clearly shows that this risk no longer exists for vaccinated individuals. As you’ll see, the risk assessments being made by the CDC, and even more so by Holy Cross, do not remotely follow the ways that we assess risk in every aspect of our lives.
The decision to force an almost entirely vaccinated campus to wear masks isn’t even consistent with the risks that Holy Cross allows us to make on campus daily. This is not about managing the risk of Covid in the best interest of Holy Cross’ students, faculty, and staff, but about managing the narrative around Holy Cross’ reputation and circumventing any possibility of criticism —criticism that would be unwarranted — against the school’s administration. This policy could have come about for two reasons: because of the conclusions of the science or because of the need to follow a narrative in order to avoid public scrutiny. It could not have come about because of both. So, since we can’t determine the merits of forcing vaccinated people to mask based on any scientific evidence or data that the school’s administration has provided us, I’ve decided to do the work for them.
Before I get into the criteria that the CDC has used to make these recommendations and what the Covid data for vaccinated hospitalizations and deaths tells us about the measures being implemented at Holy Cross, let me provide a short explainer on what I mean by “risk assessment”. A risk assessment is the analysis of trade-offs that entities like the government, schools, private businesses, and individuals make in order to maintain a reasonable level of risk that negative consequences won’t happen. In other words, it’s when we trade away certain freedoms in order to reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of something bad happening.
At the same time, a risk assessment is also an attempt to maintain certain freedoms due to an analysis that concludes that there is not enough risk to justify the diminishment of those freedoms. For example, we have all made the risk assessment that in order to travel from place to place in a reasonable amount of time, a 60-75 mph speed limit on highways is the best trade-off we can make. We trade away our freedom to drive as fast as we want on public roads to mitigate the risk of injury or death to ourselves and others in a car accident. With this analysis, we accept that many will die as a result of highways and other roads having a speed limit in the 60’s or 70’s, but that this negative consequence is acceptable given the net positive. Within the context of Covid, the negative consequences are serious illness or death. The trade-off that the CDC is recommending that we make is forcing vaccinated people to give up their freedom to choose whether or not they want to wear masks inside. As we’ll see in the data, the science simply doesn’t warrant this trade-off.
Worcester County has been placed under the “high” category for community transmission according to the CDC. Under its new guidelines, the CDC recommends that counties it labels as having “substantial” or “high” community spread should have their residents wear masks in all indoor public spaces, no matter vaccination status. Sounds scary! There must be a “substantial” or “high” number of cases — especially in a County with almost 60% of the entire population fully vaccinated and over 85% of its over 65 population fully vaccinated — if the CDC is making this type of recommendation… right? Not so much. CDC community transmission for states and counties is divided into four levels: low, moderate, substantial, and high. To determine the level of community transmission for states and counties there are two indicators. The indicator we will be looking at for Worcester County, since it is the indicator that the CDC is using, is seven day case rate per 100,000 people. In other words, it is the amount of cases per day in the last seven days for every 100,000 people in Worcester County. So, what is the number of average cases per day that the CDC believes indicates a “substantial” community transmission level, and therefore a significant enough risk to re-implement mandatory masking? 50-99.99 cases per 100,000. That is a 0.05% daily positivity rate on the low end and a 0.099% rate on the high end. This means anything above 100 cases, or a 0.1% rate, is considered “high” transmission. These are minuscule portions of the population.
Currently, Worcester County has a seven day case rate of 107, and nearly all of these cases are unvaccinated individuals. 1,158 people have tested positive for Covid in Worcester County in the last ten days — ten days being the longest amount of time it takes for Covid to stop being contagious. That’s 1,158 out of over 830,600 people. That means the percentage of the Worcester County population who have tested positive and are currently infected with Covid is 0.14%. To put this into perspective, Worcester County had over 1,000 cases every two to three days on a regular basis over the winter, hitting a daily high of 1,552 cases on January 5th. During that time, we were seeing over 150 deaths in Worcester County over two week spans. In the past two weeks there have been 8 Covid deaths in the County. The CDC has essentially determined that 1/7th of 1% of the population of Worcester County contracting Covid in the past two weeks provides sufficient risk to reimplement universal masking indoors. By any reasonable measure, this is a ludicrous amount of caution for such a small number of cases and minute risk of death.
As stated earlier, the trade offs that the CDC has determined the American people must take to mitigate risk does not follow the risk assessments that we make in all other aspects of our lives. 775,000 children under the age of 14 are sent to the emergency room with injuries sustained from playing sports every year, and 500,000 high school athletes find themselves in the ER for the same reason. 38,000 die and 4.5 million are injured in car accidents every year. 354 children, or 0.00047% of the under eighteen population, have died from Covid during the pandemic, while 788, have died from non-Covid induced pneumonia in that same period. The idea of making children wear masks to mitigate the risk of catching the flu or some other viral infection has never been considered as a serious policy, and likely would have been dismissed as child abuse rather than a reasonable protective measure. That’s because we have determined that the 0.00025% chance that a child dies from the flu is not a large enough risk to justify forcing children to breathe through sweaty cloths all day and to lose their ability to communicate properly in school. We take risks like these daily because they are necessary for us to live the lives we all want to live. If we applied the CDC’s rationale for determining risk of hospitalization or death due to Covid to how we determine risk of serious injury or death due to car accidents, the speed limit on every major highway would probably be somewhere around 5 miles per hour. Seems like a pretty unrealistic conception of risk, right? I’d guess that most of us would be up in arms with that type of miscalculation to say the least.
What is incredible about all of this is that I haven’t even gotten to the most important point: the vaccination rates at Holy Cross. Let’s say — regardless of the senselessness of the risk assessment being used to justify this type of policy — that you still believe that mask mandates need to be put into place in areas with “substantial” or “high” transmission levels to protect children and the unvaccinated. Fine. But that type of explanation wouldn’t even apply to the Holy Cross community, because, as stated in the most recent Holy Cross Covid update, above 90% of the students, faculty, and staff will be fully vaccinated by the start of the semester. 97% of students have already received at least one shot. This is what makes Holy Cross’s decision to follow the CDC guidelines even more perplexing than the CDC guidelines themselves. The already untenable justifications provided by the CDC don’t even apply to the students, faculty, and staff at Holy Cross, because the chance of a student or staff member dying from COVID-19 on an almost fully vaccinated campus is not just a statistical improbability, it is so infinitesimally small that the risk is essentially zero.
Almost all new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, not just across Worcester County but across the state, are from unvaccinated people. As of August 10th, a week after Holy Cross announced its intent to reimplement indoor mask policies, 0.002% of Massachusetts’ vaccinated population has died from Covid. And even these already tiny percentages are inflated. As reported by NBC Boston, Dr. Shira Doron, an Epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, has stated, "These 100 patients [.002% of vaccinated population] have died over the course of many months," and “In those cases, the positive test might be old, a false positive, an asymptomatic positive, a mild infection or an infection that is contributing to the illness or death of someone sick with another primary illness but not the sole cause of it."
Out of those in Massachusetts who have been vaccinated and died, 73% had underlying conditions and had a median age of 82.5. On August 7th, the Massachusetts Department of Health reported that 0.23% of fully vaccinated individuals in the state have tested positive for Covid. A week later, the department reported that this number had increased by a mere 0.06% to 0.29% and that there had only been 51 additional hospitalizations and 18 additional deaths in the entire state, making the official hospitalization rate for vaccinated individuals 0.01% and the death rate 0.003%. Nationally, three-quarters of all reported breakthrough cases have been among people 65 or older. In the week after Holy Cross made their announcement, zero people under the age of 40, vaccinated or unvaccinated, died from Covid in the state of Massachusetts. As the data shows, the risk to those who are vaccinated isn’t even distinguishable between other common diseases. About 35,000 people die and 500,000 people are hospitalized due to the flu every year in the United States. That’s about 0.01% and 0.15% of the population respectively, or five times the percentage of vaccinated deaths and nineteen times the percentage of vaccinated hospitalizations in Massachusetts due to Covid. Why has the school not required flu vaccinations in the past? Are we going to be forced to vaccinate and mask for flu season under threat of being unenrolled from classes? Of course not. Because every school, student, faculty member, and parent over the course of the last century has determined that the burden of forcing students to vaccinate and mask for a disease that kills about 40,000 people a year is too high for such a low risk.
The risk assessments of the CDC and, therefore, Holy Cross, are completely backwards. But why? If the science doesn’t justify these decisions, what’s the reason these decisions are being made? By my estimation, the reason Holy Cross has adopted the CDC’s recommendation is because of one major factor: the possibility of scrutiny. Specifically, the scrutiny of those who are currently holding institutions like Holy Cross to a non-rational standard based on misinformed beliefs about Covid. I’ve already gone on long enough about why the belief that vaccinated people are at a substantial risk is simply not based in science, but what is this “non-rational” standard?
It’s the expectation that Holy Cross should be held responsible for outbreak cases, even on an almost fully vaccinated campus. The administration has made the assessment that there is a possibility that the school’s reputation will be tarnished due to this standard. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous or unfair the standard is. It doesn’t matter that the students, staff, and faculty have done their part by getting vaccinated and are now not at risk. It doesn’t matter that wearing masks is, quite literally, a symbolic gesture to make it look like the school is being responsible. It is easier for the administration to pass the buck, commit to the false narrative that masks are in any way necessary for vaccinated individuals, and shield itself from any possibility of public scrutiny. It’s essentially a win-win. If there is outcry from groups of people who hold the non-rational belief that Covid cases among vaccinated people on campus makes the school in some way irresponsible and at fault, the school can defend itself from these criticisms by claiming that they followed CDC guidelines. On the other side of the coin — in an attempt to shield themselves from the criticisms of students, families, and staff who believe that masking is unnecessary and who are upset with the school for going back on it’s promise of “no masking” at a 90% vaccination rate — the administration can blame the CDC’s recommendation for this new masking policy by asserting that their hands were tied. All of this would make for a reasonable risk assessment if you were assessing the risk of public scrutiny and the possibility of your reputation being called into question.
It is, however, not the job of the administration to protect itself from the possibility of bad PR, especially if doing so negatively affects the learning and campus experiences of students. The one and only job of the Holy Cross administration is to provide a safe and holistic learning environment and campus experience based on risk assessments that are in the best interest of the students, faculty, and staff. That’s it. And within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, any risk assessment that is being made within the best interest of students, faculty, and staff must come about due to rational standards that are based in scientific fact. The standard being applied to Holy Cross right now is clearly not based on that science.
Now, you may be thinking “it’s just an extra few weeks of masking… why are you so concerned about this? It’s not that big of a deal” And you would be right. Having to wear masks for a few weeks at the start of school isn’t that big of a deal. And while there has been a whole lot of research that shows the serious consequences that masks have had on social interaction and communication — which I would argue is more important in educational spaces than any other social environment I could think of — a couple weeks of masking at the beginning of school isn’t some enormous request. But I’m not concerned with a few extra weeks of masking. I’m concerned that if the school is already asking people to mask before classes even start — that decision completely neglecting the scientific facts and statistical evidence we are seeing with Covid hospitalization and mortality among vaccinated people — what are we going to be asked to do if people begin to test positive on campus when we are all back? This is the most important thing for all of us to understand: some vaccinated students and staff will contract Coronavirus this semester. When this happens, the school may feel pressure, most likely from the possibility of public scrutiny of the school’s safety measures.
Here’s the truth that all of us — not just students, faculty, or administrators at HC, but all inhabitants of this country — need to get on the same page about. The goal of vaccines was never to eradicate Covid off the face of the earth. As with the flu, that will likely never happen. The point of the vaccines was to stymie massive spread and decrease hospitalization and death. We have achieved that. No amount of goalpost shifting by a headline starved media, virtue signaling politicians from both sides of the isle, or misinformed social media posts will make that untrue.
These types of measures may have been necessary to avert serious risk in the absence of a readily available vaccine. That risk doesn’t exist anymore. So, when a student or faculty member tests positive for Covid, and if Holy Cross decides to bring back more aggressive Covid mitigation measures, should you accept the reinstatement of non-optional masking, social distancing, and dorm and extracurricular restrictions on and off campus? Ask yourself, “are the tradeoffs that the school may ask me to make — having to wear a mask while I exercise, having to limit how many people I can have in my room, not being able to go and watch my friend’s sports games from the stands, not being able to eat in the dining hall with groups of friends — are these things that I would find acceptable to give up for any other type of risk?” Are you okay with having any more of your time at Holy Cross, or any more of the experiences that you were promised when you signed your letter of intent and sent in your tuition check, disrupted or even fully taken away because of that level of risk? I would argue you shouldn’t be okay with a single extra MINUTE, much less days, weeks, or God forbid months of your college experience being wasted away because of Covid policies that lack any substantive scientific justification. You’ve already had enough of that taken from you.
Let me put it in this context. Are you okay with walking across campus crosswalks, roads, and parking lots knowing that there is a 0.001% chance that you will be hit and killed by a car? Are you okay with walking up and down the numerous stairs and hills on campus to get to your classes, dorms, and dining facilities knowing that there is a 0.004% chance that you die tripping on concrete or falling down a flight of stairs? For those who have to live in The Edge next semester due to on-campus housing shortages, and who must take their cars or Holy Cross shuttles to and from campus, are you okay with knowing that you have a 0.01% risk of dying in a car accident? Of course you are. Because we, as human beings, assess risk reasonably in every facet of life.
In the face of narrative driven hysteria and the non-rational expectations of eradicating Covid, the only “vaccine” that can bring us clarity is leadership. It takes standing up and saying what needs to be said and doing what needs to be done despite the fact that you might be wrongly judged for it. For my entire life I have been told countless times that this is what leadership is. By my parents, high school teachers, coaches, professors, and by this very institution. Holy Cross still has the opportunity to show the type of leadership it expects of its graduates. At the very least, Holy Cross students, families, faculty, staff, and alumni deserve an explanation regarding how Holy Cross’ decision to cave to a non-rational standard and the unjustified pressure from a misinformed public models the leadership that all of us also expect from this school’s administration.
With this in mind, I have a challenge for the Holy Cross administration. I challenge you to pick one of these two options. Provide your students, faculty, and staff with scientific evidence as to why there is a substantial enough risk of serious illness or death on your fully vaccinated campus to implement a mask policy and to justify the trade-offs you are forcing students to make. This goes for any future restrictive policies that may be put into place in the almost certain event that a small number of vaccinated students and/or faculty test positive for Covid over the course of the semester. No passing the buck to the CDC and saying “we’re just following their guidance.” These are your decisions, not the CDC’s, and we deserve a more comprehensive justification than “a government bureaucracy recommended we do this. Sorry!” In the event that you cannot provide satisfactory scientific evidence to justify your Covid policies and the risk assessments you have made, we slide to the second option. Admit that this decision has not been made because of scientific reality or to protect students and faculty from a substantial risk. Admit that this decision has been made to protect the school’s image from non-rational public scrutiny from outside the HC community and to protect school administrators, regardless of the impact on students, from being held responsible (unjustly!) when some students catch Covid or in the 0.003% chance that something goes terribly wrong. If it is true that vaccines work, and if you cannot provide a scientific justification for why a completely vaccinated campus needs to mask and will likely be subjected to other restrictions, this is the only possible explanation for the implementation of a mask mandate.
Well, I guess there is a third option. You could decide to stay silent, evading the concerns and criticisms of paying students and families, or you could even reiterate that you are following the fundamentally flawed guidance of the CDC, which, let’s be honest, is as good as staying silent.
A special thanks to Monica Regan ‘23 who helped me with my research for this article.