The score fails: it is not possible to determine whether the outline of the green class is safe, the Ministry of Education failed to recruit the parents, and the antigen tests detect only a few verified.
It is not clear on what basis the decision was made to release tens of thousands of students from isolation.
On Tuesday night, the decision was made to extend the green classroom outline to kindergartens and daycare centers as well as to yellow cities starting this coming Sunday, but a Ministry of Health document reveals that the pilot results were inconclusive and full of problems and failures.
Although Education Minister Yifat Shasha Bitton requested that the green classroom outline be extended to red and orange authorities as well, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett decided that the Ministry of Health would formulate a different outline for these authorities, probably in the "education shield" format, which would include weekly tests in each classroom.
It is possible that the corona financiers in the schools are the ones who will be trained to carry out the sampling.
Bennett and Shasha Bitton // Photo: Oren Ben Hakon, Ohad Zweigenberg,
As for the green class outline, it was written that the pilot, which began immediately after Sukkot and lasted about two weeks, was partially carried out, so it is not possible to determine whether the outline is safe and under what conditions.
Partial execution of the outline
One of the major failures of the pilot is that the Ministries of Health and Education have not been able to recruit enough classrooms: while at the time of the announcement of the pilot it was said that it would take place in 200 classrooms, in practice it was carried out on only 97 classrooms.
During the pilot, 12 classrooms were closed due to high morbidity.
Assuming that each class has about 40 students, this is a total of about 3,000 students compared to a million and a half students in the education system, kindergartens and elementary schools, for whom the decision was made to expand the outline.
Another weakness in the pilot was the low response of parents in reporting the results of the antigen tests they performed at home: less than 25% of them reported the results in a computerized manner, and manual reports were not collected at all.
Learning at a school in Ashdod (photographers have nothing to do with the article), Photo: Liron Moldovan - Archive
Another problem is that even the classes that participated in the pilot had partial execution of the outline components, meaning that not all parents took their children to perform a PCR test in the community on the first day a verified patient was discovered in class or on the last day of the program.
A source in the Ministry of Education admitted yesterday that "the Ministry of Health is probably outraged that the pilot was carried out on a very small population of 97 classrooms, and also that it was tested for a relatively short period of a week and a half. "They did not raise a red flag and there is no rampant illness here. In the end, tens of thousands of days of isolation were avoided. According to our data, in 82% of the classes that participated in the outline, no patient was found after seven days."
A new variant has been identified in the country
The green class program in elementary schools in green cities was launched last Sunday, and as part of it, the isolation days of students living in green localities are reduced.
According to the procedure, in a classroom where a verified patient is discovered, the students in the class are examined on the first day by a PCR test, which will be performed at the Home Front Command positions or at the health funds.
Students remain in isolation until a negative answer is received, after which they return to the classroom routine, with the obligation to perform rapid antigen tests daily, which are distributed by the Ministry of Education, for six days.
On the seventh day, another PCR test will be performed, and if it is also negative, the tests will end.
Contrary to the position of the Ministry of Education, it was also decided that in the afternoon, the students participating in the green class outline will not participate in multi-participant activities that do not include the class students, and will not enter the places where the green mark applies.
This, in order to reduce the chances of infection and maintain the health of the students, while keeping the education system open.
Ben Gurion Airport, last month. A new variant in Israel (those photographed have nothing to do with the article),
Meanwhile, the AY4.2 variant, which has already been discovered in several European countries, was first identified in Israel yesterday.
The verified variant is an 11-year-old boy who returned from abroad and has already been identified when he landed at Ben Gurion Airport.
He was in isolation and no further verified contacts were found.
