Mask or no mask: a decision for teachers, parents, and students

• August, 2021
• Institute for Clinical & Translational Research, Baylor College of Medicine

REPORT

With increasing incidences of COVID-19 infections in the Greater Houston Area and students returning to school, informed decisions must be made regarding teacher and student continuous masking recommendations.

As of today (August 21),

1. An executive order is in place which prohibits Texas government funded entities from mandating mask wearing on premises.
2. Houston ISD is one of a handful of schools in the Houston area which does have a mask wearing mandate in place.
3. Colleges in the our area have established differing policies. Notably, Rice University has COVID policies that mandate mask wearing indoors.

To provide quantitative insight into these mixed stances, we ran a targeted simulation using our COVID-19 Outbreak Simulator to compare the number of COVID-cases that develop in schools that mandate or do not mandate mask wearing.

How to reproduce this simulation

1. Install COVID-19 Outbreak Simulator
2. Install jupyterlab, and jupyterlab-sos, which will install the SoS Polyglot Notebook and SoS Workflow Engine.
3. Start a jupyter lab server and open the back-to-school.ipynb notebook.
4. After finishing the report, use command

sos convert back_to_school.ipynb index.html --template sos-report-only

to generate the report