With Israel's number of new confirmed COVID cases topping 1,000 for the first time in a month, Israel Hayom has reached out to public health experts to ask their opinions about the government's plans to lift more restrictions put in place as part of the second lockdown and send children in all grades back to school.
Many of the interviewees agreed that the government should stop opening more business and service sectors, and a few even recommended that this year's Hanukkah vacation be cancelled to avoid large gatherings in enclosed spaces.
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Professor Ronit Calderon-Margalit of the School of Public Health at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem thinks that a distinction should be made between policies applied to schools and policies applied to businesses.
"For the sake of our children, we have to reopen the school system. Beyond that, the children study in designated placed and do not move from city to city, so we can map out 'red' and 'green' places and prepare accordingly. Only the teachers move around from town to town and from school to school, so we should be testing teachers a lot, but the schools themselves should be open, certainly in 'green' communities," Calderon-Margalit said.
"As far as business activity, we need to wait for the moment and not overburden the system, but see what effect the school reopenings have. We need to explain to the public that winter is here, big time, and that means flu and a greater burden on the health care system that needs to be taken into account. In addition, in winter people naturally congregate in warm places, crowd together, so reopening shopping malls right now would be a gamble," Calderon-Margalit added
The professor said that while she is not a fervent supporter of restrictions, COVID-19 is a dangerous illness and it would be a mistake to reopen all business activity at once, especially in the winter.
"If it were up to me, we would cancel the Hanukkah vacation so children won't flood into malls and shopping centers," she said, adding that if the decision were hers to make, she would not reopen gyms, restaurants, or any enclosed places where people might gather.
Professor Nadav Davidovitch, head of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a member of the team of experts that is advising the government on COVID policy, thinks that the public should be involved in the process of reopening business activity, which should be carried out cautiously and not all at once.
"If we open everything right now, it could bring us to a very bad place. Because of winter, people tend to gather in enclosed spaces and that could lead to a major outbreak, so we shouldn't go crazy. However, we need to state what is allowed so the public has things to do. We should go back to the stoplight plan, with places graded red, orange, and green," Davidovitch said.
"We need to allow communities to execute local operations to reduce the number of cases, which means giving more power to local authorities. I'm certain that a small community can handle an outbreak very well, and that might be possible in big cities, too. But for that, we need to enlist COVID personnel and inspectors with authorities given to them by various municipalities, which will provide work for some of the unemployed," he explained.
Davidovitch said that pilot programs to reopen shopping malls should be allowed to proceed, and the results evaluated. He also called for extensive outreach, as the public's cooperation was a necessary component to any plan.
"People need to download the [Health Ministry's] Magen 2 app and cooperate with us," he said.
Davidovitch also noted that there were still diseases other than COVID that required care. "It's winter now, and there are a lot of patients with chronic illnesses who need care, we need to go on and vaccinate against measles, which is kind of limping along, and only close cooperation and caution will allow the health care system to move ahead with every aspect of public health care.
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