Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a decision on Wednesday night to keep Israel’s schools open despite the alarming rise of coronavirus cases being diagnosed among students and staff, with only schools with a confirmed case of the virus being closed.
Many disagree with the decision, saying that schools should be closed and long-distance learning should be resumed, with many parents choosing to keep their children home.
Prof. Gabi Barbash, former health ministry director-general and CEO of Ichilov Hospital, said in an interview on Thursday that although children are at minimal risk of getting seriously ill from the coronavirus, “the closing of schools is due to the fear of the infections spreading from the schools to the general community.”
“It wasn’t necessary in the first place to reopen the educational system beyond the capsules…putting 30 – 40 children into a classroom and hoping that this virus…won’t spread is a mistake. Now we need to fix this mistake and that can be done by closing the schools with even one case but in my opinion, we should take it a step further and return to the capsules.”
Chairman of the Teachers’ Union, Yaffa Ben-David, asked Netanyahu on Wednesday to have 4th-9th graders resume long-distance learning and 3rd graders and under should return to a capsule system, with small groups of children separated from each other in order to protect teachers, who are in contact with hundreds of students.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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6 Responses
This aticle doesn’t explain what “capsules” are…
This article doesn’t explain what capsules are well enough…
Putting 30-40 kids in a classroom even during the best of times is a bad decision.
The classes are way too large, our children are not being educated. Most of the facilities are parsed out to the disturbed. The good kids are all passed over and thru a sustem.
Not the fault of the teachers, they are working hard but the deck is stacked against them/
Fire the entire ministry and rebuild it from the top down.
But according to their own statistics based on antibody testing, only 10% of persons infected get sick. So that in a class of 30 students, only three students will get ill from Covid19 (the rest will be infected, but with little or no symptoms). One should ask why should you cancel school since three students in the class are out sick. Instead they should encourage masks, social distancing and good hygiene (especially for the teachers, since if 10% of the teachers are out sick that might be more of a problem). The governments’ own statistics based on random antibody tests are, worldwide, showing that for every person who is sick enough to be tested there are ten who had the disease without symptoms which strongly suggests that depriving students of education (and depriving parents of their jobs and savings) was not justified.
was a mistake No it wasn’t a mistake:- 1) It was criminal; 2) It was burying their head in the sand.
However letting some foreign Yeshiva Bochurim back into Israel, is no mistake, and far less likely to cause any resurgence of corona, but Israeli government is so stubborn, that no-one can budge them to hear the full truth & reality.
It’s tough to know when this pandemic is over, but apparently Israel jumped the gun. Let’s hope we don’t make a similar mistake in New York, by opening up summer camps. As Rabbi Berra says, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”