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“We need to get them back to normal,” said Dr. Lucy McBride, an internist in Washington, D.C., who has joined other doctors in calling for an end to school mask mandates.

“I think the dam is breaking,” she added.

“It’s hard to speak out because there’s been this sort of protect-against-Covid-at-all-costs attitude, which made sense in 2020, when we had no vaccines,” she said. “It just doesn’t add up anymore.”

But Dr. Jeanne Craft, president of the New Jersey chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said she was still treating children who become seriously ill from Covid. While vaccines are widely available, she noted that pediatric inoculation rates, particularly for children age 5 to 11, are low. Children exposed in school can also transmit the virus to vulnerable relatives at home, including siblings younger than 5, who are not yet able to be vaccinated.

“Saying that children are less likely to die of Covid, less likely to get severely sick from Covid, doesn’t mean that they can’t and that they don’t,” Dr. Craft said.

She stressed the importance of being willing to quickly adjust policies as virus rates change within communities.

“We are all cautiously optimistic in New Jersey that this most recent surge seems to have peaked,” she said. “But we were happy after the first and second surges ended, too.”

Mask rules in schools around the world vary widely, with some countries requiring pupils to wear them despite very low infection rates and others mandating masks only for older students, or only during surges in the pandemic.