Students over the age of 12 who have not received the third dose of the coronavirus vaccine and received their second vaccine dose more than six months ago will not be allowed to return to school, it was decided at a discussion led tonight (Thursday) by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and senior health officials.
Channel 12 News revealed that unvaccinated students will only be able to enter schools by presenting a negative coronavirus test.
It was also decided at the hearing that anyone who has not yet received the third dose will receive a text message or voicemail daily reminding them how many days are left until they lose their Green Passes.
It was also determined that IDF medics will assist the HMOs in administering flu vaccines to alleviate the burden on the health system this winter.
A panel of experts which advises the Israeli government on coronavirus policy criticized the government’s current approach as insufficient and warned that morbidity levels would rise again if new restrictions are not implemented.
“The government has opted for an intermediate option – an ‘absorption’ policy for an indefinite period of time with almost no major effort to curb and reduce infections, and in the event that a threshold of critically ill patients is reached, only then to return to containment efforts,” the experts determined.
“As we warned beforehand, a long series of critical tools to break the chain of infection (tools focused on the infected and their environment such as epidemiological investigation, early detection, careful isolation and enforcement) are no longer applicable at the stage where there are between 8,000 and 10,000 patients per day. And the range of options is reduced to the family of non-selective tools, which by their nature are more detrimental to the economy and less acceptable to the public,” they said.
The experts added that “as a conclusion for the medium term and after the fourth wave – this approach … is dangerous and the approach that operates a wider range of tools (Green Pass, crowd limits) at an earlier stage – is the correct one to use going forward.”
They added that the Health Ministry must prepare for the possibility that the reopening of schools after the holidays will bring with it a further increase in morbidity, all while there is no capacity left in the health system, so a further increase in morbidity may have a heavy price.
Source: Arutz Sheva