Without guaranteeing continuity in learning, Israel risks raising a generation of zombies, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Wednesday, as he met with education officials, teachers and parents’ representatives to discuss the reopening of schools next week amid the continuing pandemic.
“If parents can’t work, there is no functioning economy,” Bennett said. “If children don’t go to school, they get worse under all parameters. We need to enable continuity in learning, otherwise we will raise a generation of zombies.”
The prime minister said that in order for the public to be able to cooperate, the outline for the education system needs to be clear and understandable by everyone, and must only include requirements that the public can fulfill.
Most Israeli students – currently on vacation for Sukkot – are set to return to their classrooms on September 30.
On Sunday, the government decided that children in preschools and in grades 1-6 will need to present a negative PCR test result in order to attend classes, as they had to do at the beginning of the school year on September 1.
According to data presented during the meeting, 715,000 antigen tests – about 45% of the total needed – have been distributed.
Earlier in the day, the pilot for the “Green Class outline” was launched in two schools in the Arab town of Abu Ghosh, in addition to some haredi (ultra-Orthodox) schools where it started to be tested last month.
Under the program, children who were exposed to a verified patient do not enter isolation but are tested every day for seven days. More schools are set to be added to the pilot program after the holiday, and the government is expected to make a decision on implementing the outline in the whole education system by October 15.
In addition, the Education Shield program also started to be tested in four schools, under which all teachers and students are tested once a week in order to monitor and prevent outbreaks.
According to the Wednesday report by the Health Ministry, schoolchildren represent more than half of the active cases in the country, 40,000 out of 75,000. Almost 100,000 students are in isolation after being exposed to a verified case.
Forty percent of the new virus carriers found in the past week were children up to 11 years old, who are too young to be inoculated. Another 14% are 12-18.
“We tend to think that all wisdom is found here, but I do not believe it,” said Bennett. “I asked for a study comparing advanced education systems in the Western world – the UK, Germany, the USA. The tendency is to avoid isolation as a default measure and replace it with mass antigen testing.
“I say in advance: the first days of October will be complicated, but we have been working to make the necessary preparations,” said Bennett. “This requires a pilot, there’s nothing to do. We need to run it for two weeks and then I will make a decision. But parents, teachers and students need to know that we intend to find a good solution.”
The prime minister also said the government will continue to pursue a path of calculated risk, rather than panic.
Earlier in the day, the daily report by the Health Ministry showed that 93% of the new coronavirus cases in Israel in the past week were identified among the unvaccinated population, or among those vaccinated over six months earlier.
So far, 3.1 million Israelis have received a booster (third) dose of the Pfizer vaccine, 5.59 million have received two doses and 6.07 million one dose.
On Tuesday, 4.7% of the 108,000 people screened tested positive, and there were 4,800 new cases identified.
The number of daily cases has varied greatly in the past two weeks because of the effect of the holidays, with the number of tests performed ranging between 55,000 and 185,000. The result was as few as 3,000 to over 10,000 virus carriers identified in a single day.
As of Wednesday, the number of serious patients stood at 723, similar to the past few days, but with a slight increase compared with the first two weeks of September, when the number fluctuated between 650 and 700.
At the same time, the R rate continued to decrease on Wednesday, dropping to 0.83.