Israel : Despite High Vaccination Rates for Adults, Children Increasingly Victims of COVID - Schools Unlikely to Reopen : JPost
While adults over the age of 40 are getting vaccinated at an almost miraculous rate, Israel is seeing a sharp rise in the number of children and teens getting infected with coronavirus, according to Health Ministry statistics.
Now, there is a possibility that even when the government starts to lift the lockdown, schools may not be able to open as originally assumed.
More than 50,000 children and teens have been diagnosed with coronavirus since the start of the month, many more than Israel saw in any month during the first or second waves.
“We got a letter from the Israeli Association of Pediatrics that says they are very worried about the rate of disease in younger students,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein told The Jerusalem Post. “This is something we did not witness in previous waves of corona.”
Jerusalem’s Hadassah-University Medical Center last weekend opened Israel’s first coronavirus intensive-care unit for children with four patients. Today, according to the hospital, there are seven children being treated at the hospital, among them two who are intubated and in serious condition.
Instead of around 29% of new cases coming from children and teens, as in the second wave, now they are around 40% of cases, Public Health Services head Sharon Alroy-Preis said in the Knesset on Monday. The greatest spike was in children between the ages of six and nine, she said.
And according to Cyrille Cohen, head of Bar-Ilan University’s immunotherapy laboratory, the numbers seem to be rising.
The healthcare system is having difficulty explaining the outbreak, but one hypothesis is that it is tied to the British mutation, which has spread rapidly across Israel.
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