In early March, a pandemic celebrity best known for advocating that schools should move toward a pre-COVID normal wielded her weapon of choice, arguing in The Atlantic that lifting mask mandates for all but the youngest students is “.”

Emily Oster laid out what she, and many others, understood to be the situation at hand in her opening paragraph: “Although the CDC recently moved to relax COVID guidelines, it continues to recommend universal indoor masking in early-childhood-education programs for those ages 2 and older.” 

The CDC’s coronavirus for child care providers, last updated Jan. 28, lists a number of “key takeaways,” including that the agency “recommends universal indoor masking in [early childhood education] programs for those ages 2 years and older, regardless of vaccination status.”

But in a surprising twist, about a week later, the Brown University economist posted an update on her Instagram story.

“After my piece in @theatlantic last week, the CDC emailed me to let me know they DO NOT recommend masking for toddlers in areas with low or moderate transmission. Toddlers’ masking recommended to align with everyone else,” she wrote. “They are struggling to get the message out so maybe this will help!”

“I realize that seems a little crazy, but I am telling you that is the email I received from a senior person at the CDC.”

The federal agency has a yellow banner at the top of its that says the CDC’s latest recommendations “align precautions for educational settings with those for other community settings.”

“That banner … is intended to replace all of the information that is below it in the bullets that say that kids should still be masking,” Oster said in an Instagram video.

In late February, the CDC made major news when it replaced its previous recommendation that all schools require universal masking, stipulating instead that classrooms could now go mask-optional when community COVID rates were low or moderate, the current virus level across most of the country.

But without a vaccine available for those younger than 5, Oster and many others understood the guidance to apply only to K-12 schools, not early child care and pre-K programs. The CDC is “easing its recommendations for wearing masks in indoor K-12 settings,” the Los Angeles Times .

But in fact, the guidance was meant to apply to all educational levels, including those under 5.

In a Thursday email to ����Ӱ��, the CDC confirmed that “recommendations for masks in K-12 schools and early care and education (ECE) programs are consistent with recommendations for other community settings.” 

“Children ages 2-4 have a lower risk of severe disease from COVID-19 and parents of children in ECE programs as well as ECE staff can make appropriate choices about mask wearing in school settings based on local requirements and their personal levels of risk,” wrote spokesperson Jade Fulce.

She did not explain why it has taken the agency several weeks to update its website, but said they would make the information available “as soon as possible.”

To New York City parent Daniela Jampel, whose 4-year-old daughter has continued masking while her older sister goes to school face exposed, the delay is unacceptable.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “The CDC is having trouble updating its website so they reach out to Emily Oster?”

“Their website on this issue should not be left to interpretation. It should be very clear,” said Jampel, an early advocate for amid remote learning and now an outspoken critic of the city’s decision to leave masking in place for preschoolers.

Oster agreed that the unconventional communication method underscores the widespread confusion on the issue, but clarified that the CDC did not contact her asking her to spread the word about their policy. Rather, they were correcting what they said was inaccurate information in her Atlantic piece.

“They weren’t like, ‘Oh, by the way, it would be great if you could share with people this information,’” Oster told ����Ӱ��. “They just said, ‘Everybody should already know this.’ But I think it’s pretty clear looking at … how people responded that they have not managed to make that clear.”

Several parents, mostly in blue states like New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois, responded to Oster’s update saying that their child care provider was still requiring masks, said the professor.

“I showed this (post) to my provider,” many parents wrote, and in response were told, “Well, if the website still says that masks are required, that’s not our interpretation of what that banner is.”

“There is a fair amount of people looking to this guidance and trying to interpret it and the way that it is currently stated is extremely difficult to interpret clearly,” said Oster.

The confusion extended to The Atlantic itself, which did not immediately update Oster’s original column to reflect the CDC’s clarified guidance after Oster received the agency’s email. In a follow-up interview with ����Ӱ��, Oster said she corresponded with her editor, but because the CDC had made no official announcement on how to interpret the vague website, the outlet decided not to alter its story at that time.

“[The fact-checker] read the banner at the top, but then everything below it still said there should be masking,” she said. “It went under the radar.”

However, after this story first published and ����Ӱ�� requested comment from The Atlantic, Oster’s piece was updated Thursday night to reflect the disconnect in the CDC’s guidance between the banner and the information below it.

Many early childhood education providers nationwide continue to require universal masking for 2- to 4-year olds.

Head Start, a federal school readiness program serving over 800,000 children from low-income families each year, 2-year-olds and up to wear face masks indoors, although in a Jan. 1 ruling, a U.S. district judge on the program’s rule in 24 states, mostly Republican. In the remaining 26 states, even those that long ago lifted their school mask mandates, participating toddlers are still required to cover up.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams cited hospitalization data when announcing earlier this month that the country’s largest school district was lifting its K-12 mask mandate but keeping the rule for 2- to 4-year-olds.

“When you look at those under 5, they were more likely to be hospitalized,” Adams . “People wanted to say, ‘Let’s lift it across the board,’ but that’s not what the science was showing us.”

Masking in early child care settings is associated with a in program closures due to virus outbreaks, according to a recent study from doctors at Yale University. But the data were collected during the early months of the pandemic before vaccines were available to staff.

And while federal data show that hospitalizations for children under 5 did spike during the Omicron surge, an outsized share of that uptick was driven by newborns not yet 6 months old, who the masking guidance does not apply to anyway.

Meanwhile, COVID cases in Europe are , fueled by a more transmissible Omicron subvariant. Even as infections continue to , many experts warn that the increases across the pond could foreshadow a coming wave in America.

Jampel, despite frustration with the CDC’s haphazard rollout of its guidance for toddlers, doubts whether more clarity would impact the rules affecting her family. 

“New York City schools have done many things that go far beyond what the CDC recommends,” she said. “I’m not convinced that it’s the CDC holding us up, and I’m not convinced that a CDC change will mean that our political leaders will take notice and change their policies.”

Neither the Department of Education nor the Department of Health immediately responded to requests for comment.

Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, said the two key questions on the issue are “What are the health benefits from masking young children?” and “What are the developmental consequences?”

“The problem with trying to be an expert on this issue is that there is very limited science on which to base conclusions,” he told ����Ӱ�� in an email. “With respect to the health benefits, the known risks to young children from infection are quite small but this is a novel virus with unknown long-term risks.”

“All this leads me to think,” he continued, “that masks for young children may be prudent when there is a high rate of community transmission” — a conclusion that lands him in alignment with the now clarified CDC guidance.

But with all the CDC’s communication glitches along the way, Oster worries it will impact the public’s faith in the agency, which has been shaken several times throughout the two-year pandemic.

“This erodes trust,” she said. “If people are trying to trust the CDC, they’re trying to listen to them, when the messaging is confused in this way, or incomplete in this way, it makes people less likely to pay attention to the CDC.” 

In December and January, his 8,900-student district just north of Atlanta partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study classroom virus transmission, ultimately adjusting their distancing protocols to reduce spread. In September, after reading an written by a Harvard University professor that proposed using rapid antigen tests to give healthy kids an alternative to quarantine, he reached out directly to the author asking about the model — and ultimately implemented the “” scheme in his schools. Now, the district is planning to hold for students this month as COVID shots roll out for younger kids.

But despite a keen eye for the latest coronavirus safety research, Rivera made another move in mid-October that many parents had clamored for, but health experts cautioned against: He lifted Marietta’s mask requirement.

“​​We tried to get to a solution that we think is good for our community,” the superintendent told ����Ӱ��. “Could I give kids a bit more sense of normalcy back that they haven’t had for two years? I think that’s a question we’re grappling with.” 

The move typifies a trend emerging nationwide, as school leaders respond to .

At least a dozen districts that previously required face coverings are now mask-optional, including ; and . Of the 200 largest U.S. school systems, 135 now have mask mandates — down from 150 on Oct. 1 and lower than at any point this school year since mid-August, according to , a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

That pattern worries Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University.

Over the summer, the health expert used simulation modeling technology to predict how many positive COVID cases would be transmitted in schools, depending on their vaccination rates and mitigation measures. The that he and his team published in August recommended that schools drop universal face-covering rules only once 80 percent of students and staff are fully immunized and community transmission is below 10 cases per 100,000 people. 

Currently, the U.S. averages . And while as many as , of eligible youth have received both shots.

Vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 are expected to roll out in days and as many as with children in the age group plan to have their kids immunized, according to surveys, but a significant share before doing so, they say. About a quarter said they definitely would not vaccinate their children.

With vaccination rates as they currently stand, school buildings are largely full of people unprotected against the virus, Linas pointed out.

“That is a setup for trouble in the future, having ongoing smoldering transmission because people are under vaccinated and we’re not wearing masks,” he told ����Ӱ��. “The virus continues, new variants emerge — those threats are real.”

Other experts, including Joseph Allen, the Harvard public health professor that Rivera corresponded with about Marietta’s test-and-stay approach, argue that schools should take a more dynamic approach to masking requirements, dropping them when transmission falls. Given the current situation, he advocates for the end of all school face-covering requirements by January, if not sooner.

“If things change for the worse — and they might — then we just pull the masks back out of the drawer. But we must be just as willing to put them away when things look better,” Allen wrote in an October .

At the state level, Massachusetts has set a benchmark that aligns with the Linas’s recommendation, for any school that reaches 80 percent student and staff vaccination. But new guidance in allows schools to scrap face coverings where community transmission is low and gives districts the option to do the same if they maintain stringent quarantine rules. Neither policy accounts for immunization levels in the school community.

Georgia, similarly, is a state that gives local school leaders the power to set their own coronavirus safety policies. In Marietta, the district’s program for testing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus played into the calculus for Rivera’s decision to go mask-optional.

“There’s an interplay between these approaches,” the superintendent said. “Your approach to masks will impact the distance at which you are identifying close contacts — three feet vs. six feet, indoors. The number of students who are identified as close contacts, that drives your test-and-stay demand.” 

Because 98 percent of would-be quarantines in his district never ultimately tested positive, Rivera hoped the testing policy, which the district has funded partially through relief dollars, would keep students learning in the classroom, regardless of whether they were wearing masks. 

Out of 281 tests so far administered by the program, 271 have come back negative, the superintendent said — meaning those students have been able to stay in the school building.

The “test-to-stay” strategy has been this fall and is lauded by public health experts. The CDC said in mid-October that they are considering into their school coronavirus guidance.

Regarding masking, the CDC recommends universal use, but in practice, the policies have been much more controversial, with eruptions over the mandates in dozens of districts. 

“I felt like I’ve had to navigate this path by myself,” said Rivera. “I feel like most people sit on either side of it. Either it’s, ‘Nope, we have to follow blindly what the CDC says,’ or we pretend that COVID doesn’t exist. And I don’t think either one of those is right, there’s a balance in the middle.”

The softened masking rules have had some real benefits, according to teachers in the district. Foreign language classes, for instance, were strained when everyone had to cover up.

“It is really tough when kids are learning a new language for the first time to pronounce new sounds, not seeing how to form their mouth, or [seeing] my mouth because I’m covered up in a mask,” Wendy Locke, a French teacher at Marietta High School, told ����Ӱ��.

Barbie Esquijarosa, who teaches English to non-native speakers at the high school, agrees that face coverings make school more difficult for young people learning English. But she also worries that the mask-optional policy presents an added stressor for the students she teaches, many of whom may live with older relatives and lack health insurance.

“They come in concerned,” said Esquijarosa. “They’re wearing [the mask] the whole time. They’ll stay away from the kids who don’t wear the masks.”

What’s more, many of her students lack transportation, meaning they aren’t able to participate in Marietta’s test-and-stay program if they have possible COVID exposures.

Rivera recognizes that the program is accessible only to students with transportation and is working to designate a bus to pick up kids for COVID testing. But as of yet, no such route is in operation. Like many other districts across the country, Marietta’s bus driver reserves are amid wider facing schools and the U.S. economy.

Elsewhere, some school districts have taken an opposite stance on masking. When the department of health in Douglas County, Colorado moved to remove face-covering mandates, the school district sued on behalf of nine medically vulnerable students — winning a on the new rule.

“No parent should be forced to choose between sending their child to school and risking their child’s health, and no family should have to fear that their child may face life-threatening illness just to access their right to a great education,” Superintendent Corey Wise said in a statement.

Back in Marietta, there has been no increase in coronavirus infections since Rivera dropped universal masking rules. Total infections have fallen from 233 in the first five weeks of schools to 143 in the seven weeks that followed, according to the district.

Still, Linas, the Boston University medical expert, cautions against the mask-optional policy. 

Breathing room now for students and staff may mean breathing room for the virus — to mutate and evolve — in the long run, he said.

“It just doesn’t make sense to start rolling those dice when we’re so close to the actual finish line.”