Masking Rules in Michigan Schools: COVID Data and Citizen Science
The COVID-19 pandemic has defined itself time and time again as a profoundly global problem. Waves ebb and flow across the globe, regionally in the US, and through states, counties, and cities. Through all this, it’s experienced locally — changing how you get groceries, meet with coworkers, celebrate with family, and even go to school.
Moving forward through the Fall 2021 season (and beyond), an emerging theme is living with the reality of COVID-19 and mitigating risk. While some counties are reinstating indoor mask mandates and renewing some COVID-19 restrictions, jurisdictions are not eager to lockdown again. But challenges remain in getting the remaining unvaccinated Americans covered. We recently hit the milestone of 75% of Americans having at least one dose, hospitals remain overwhelmed with variants resulting in high case numbers, predominantly among the unvaccinated. Measures to mitigate COVID spread in key locations will be central to controlling the spread. Further, the decisions we (and our policy-makers) make now will impact the fall season, the holidays, and new year to come. For my part, I’d rather not have another virtual Winter holiday 🙃.
Here’s where citizen science projects like the Michigan Mask Map come in:
Led by Kara Gavin, this crowdsourced effort aggregates school district and private school mask policies into an interactive map, available here: https://bit.ly/MImaskmap. Gavin’s writeup on Patch outlines the effort to date. (Since that article appeared, she has changed the color of the pins marking districts that recommend, but don’t require, mask use. They have gone from red to dark blue, to accommodate people with color blindness.) As county health departments have issued mask-related public health orders that apply to all schools within their boundaries, and as some schools and districts have instituted mask requirements on their own, Gavin has changed the pin colors accordingly. This includes her own home district and county, where she has helped organize parents to speak up in support of a mask requirement that is now in place.
The Atlas team overlaid this critical data on school policies with COVID-data from the New York Times to get a better understanding of relationships between policy decisions and COVID-19 outcomes (https://theuscovidatlas.org/michigan-masks). Updating daily, this page provides a first exploration of emerging trends in policies and COVID-19 rates, and is the first of many community-engaged data projects the Atlas team hopes to undertake in the coming phase of the pandemic. Visualizing this data helps highlight mask policies in individual school districts, but also those in the surrounding areas. While there appear to be some clusters of activity (i.e. green dots, representing mandated mask requirements in K-12 schools, in and around Detroit and in some western parts of the state, which are seeing lower confirmed case rates) the multi-colored dots scattered throughout suggest that policies vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Citizen science can make a difference, right now. Do you know of any projects that need a helping hand with COVID-19 data? Or, anything we can boost? Tag us on Twitter @covid_atlas — we’re here to help answer questions, supply data, and collaborate with the community to make this citizen science happen.
Susan Paykin and Kara Gavin also contributed to this post.
