https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openings-were-a-disaster-that-wiped-out-lockdown-gains
The assessment of Israel’s trajectory has direct bearing on the heated debate underway in the United States between President Donald Trump, who is demanding a nationwide reopening of schools for what appear to be largely political reasons, and health authorities who caution it could put the wider population at risk.
Importantly, on May 17 in Israel it appeared the virus
not only was under control, but defeated. Israel reported only 10 new
cases of COVID-19 in the entire country that day. In the U.S., the
debate often is about reopening schools where the disease is not only
not in decline, but surging.
On Sunday, for instance, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday,
“There’s nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is
in any way dangerous.” But that is not the case in Israel, where the
data from June, the last month for which there is a full set of
statistics, appear all too clear.
Galia Rahav, who chairs the department of infectious diseases at the
Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, said in an interview that “what
happened in schools is just too much gathering, day after day, and kids
come home and infect mom and dad. The top numbers of new infections were
in kids.”
Due to the large number of infections among children, she noted, “the
average age of an Israeli with COVID-19 has gone down to between 20 and
39,” while infections in citizens over 65 have held steady. In
Jerusalem, the Israeli city with the highest rate of infection, most of
the people with COVID-19 are under the age of 35.
So questions that have to be asked
ReplyDelete1) How tight was screening in the morning when children arrived? Were they checked for symptoms? Did they have their temperatures taken?
2) What precautions did teachers and staff take at the end of the day in case they'd been contaminated? Or did they just go home and spread it freely?