The number of patients will increase, the classrooms will be closed and hundreds of thousands of students in kindergartens and elementary schools will sit at home.
The new outline that sends any student who is not vaccinated to isolation without any way to break free from it (as was the case in the green classroom), challenges the education system in kindergartens and elementary schools to remain open.
In practice, if there is no change in the data graph, there could be a situation of actual closure on hundreds of thousands of students.
Morbidity data from the weekend have already indicated about 30,000 students from Verona Corona, and another 88,835 students in isolation (but in practice the number of students in isolation is higher).
But another significant number that needs to be looked at is the number of new patients in the education system each day.
Last Thursday, 6,297 patients were added to the hospital count, which includes about 5,500 students and another 824 staff members (out of 16,830 newly verified).
Education Minister Yifat Shasha Bitton: "We will do everything for the students to study maximum days physically in a school with a minimum of isolations" // Photo: Photo: Yaniv Zohar
Due to the new isolation outline, any unvaccinated student should do a supervised antigen test and go into isolation. The big problem is in elementary schools and kindergartens, where students are barely vaccinated (more than 800,000 students ages 11-5 are not vaccinated). In such cases all students in the class are sent for one week of isolation, since with the cancellation of the green class outline, there is no exemption from isolation based on daily PCR and antigen tests. That is, if out of 5,500 students half of them are in kindergarten and elementary school, and each grade has about 30-25 students, that means 70,000 students go into isolation. There are about 96,000 classrooms in the education system in total, and there are already more than 13,000 classrooms with morbidity, of which about 6,000 are in primary schools - most of which are not vaccinated. However, there may be cases where a class with morbidity is not sent entirely to isolation.
Another important fact is that the 6,000 new patients in the education system constitute almost 40% of all patients in the country. Of course, the higher the number of patients, the more classrooms and schools will be closed. Corona projector Prof. Nachman Ash estimated that this week we will reach 50,000 new patients every day. If 40% of them belong to the education system - then the number of patients in the education system may cross the threshold of 20,000 patients this week, half of whom are students in the lower strata, who are not vaccinated. This will lead to the mass closure of classrooms in kindergartens and primary schools and to hundreds of thousands of students in actual isolation.
Prof. Ash: "It is difficult to predict what peak we will reach, the delta is also spreading again" // Photo: GPO
The isolation routine
"As the days go by, more and more classrooms in kindergartens and elementary schools seem to be closing, and those that open may close again in the isolation routine. The morbidity situation currently justifies closing the classrooms, and more and more children will remain at home until this wave passes."
This is what Prof. Yizhar Ben-Shlomo, head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Safed Academic College, says.
According to him, the outline of the green class is unrealistic at the current rate of infection: "There is too much pressure on the PCR testing complexes, and the antigen test is not a reliable test. "The situation today is so fluid that, in my opinion, there is really no basis today for an informed approach that will answer all the problems."
His solution is to vaccinate young children: "The recommendation to vaccinate has two legs, one leg because children are the field of thorns where the fire called omicron spreads, and the other leg is that children may suffer from long-term syndrome."
Shortage of manpower
Another problem of the education system is that there is a severe shortage of teachers, as there is no one to replace sick teachers or whose family members are sick - or teachers in isolation who are not vaccinated. Managers have to deal with a full-time system of guys. At the end of the week, 4,156 teaching staff were registered in the education system for Corona patients and another 3,212 isolated education staff. Apart from that, even teachers whose family members are sick (e.g., young children) stay home to care for them. This means, as mentioned, a severe shortage of manpower in the education system, and as a result entire classes move to study from home.
Thus, for example, parents of sixth-graders from Petah Tikva received a message that the families of two teachers are sick and therefore the learning is moving online, in zoom. "There is no longer an elementary school that does not have two closed classrooms, let alone the fact that entire schools are closed," says Ronit, a mother of two. She said, "I do not want to imagine what will be here in a week, it looks like they are going to close in the education system - the schools are open but the students are at home. Every message in the class group just jumps out and makes a heart attack."
For the recent period, Education Minister Yifat Shasha Bitton has been talking about reducing educational and emotional gaps, but the current wave may take students back again.
When you look at the post-primary education system - middle schools and high schools - there is a high vaccination rate, but the question arises what to do with students who are not vaccinated and who have to go into a week of isolation while their classmates continue to study.
In classrooms that are immunized and not, the question arises as to whether the Ministry of Education will be able to create classrooms for students who can reach frontal studies, to maintain the learning sequence, and who will teach the students who are forced to stay home and study remotely.
Such a move could create quite a few difficulties for the education system.
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