Sunday was the “first day of school” for children in the state school system – 1st through 3rd graders and 11 and 12th graders. According to the Health Ministry, 44% of Israel’s coronavirus cases are children, a statistic that led ministry officials to push for the re-opening of schools to be delayed by another week. However, they were rebuffed by the Finance Ministry, which feared further damage to the already beleaguered Israeli economy.
According to a Channel 13 News report, only a quarter of the children authorized to return to school actually did as some cities weren’t prepared in time. In other cases, parents were fearful of sending their children despite governmental approval.
Finance and Health Ministry officials met again on Monday to discuss a rollback of further restrictions that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced on Monday night, including allowing malls, markets and gyms to re-open by the end of the week as well as increasing the number of people allowed at outdoor weddings and other gatherings to 50. All pre-schools and kindergartens will re-open by Sunday and all students will return to their classrooms by the end of May.
The meetings on rollbacks have been fraught with friction between Health Ministry officials, who are pushing to block or delay further openings of the economy out of fear of a resurgence of a coronavirus outbreak, and Finance Ministry officials, who are desperate to restart the economy.
“In cannot be that the Health Ministry’s monopoly will torpedo any decision it does not seem to like, which makes government meetings worthless,” Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon said on Monday.
“After a strenuous three days of work with the Finance Ministry on an orderly plan for the economy that was scheduled to be finalized this morning, the Health Ministry found it appropriate to issue a new procedures document at 4:00 a.m. that would prevent any possibility of compliance,” said the head of the Bussiness Sector in Israel, an umbrella organization of large businesses.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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Does “cases” refer to: 1) Testing positive; 2) Having antibodies; 3) requiring hospitalization. Only the later is of concern or is newsworthy, and would contradict the experience of every other country. The testing elsewhere has shown that most people who “get” the coronavirus do not get seriously ill, and that it is rare for younger people to get seriously ill; the number of people who “have” the disease when large populations are randomly tested is many times higher (perhaps as much as 10 times higher) than cases discovered when only those with symptoms are tested. In other words, we are all probably going to get (or have gotten) coronavirus, and most of us won’t even notice.