Next week’s school restart will make elderly more vulnerable, experts warn

Elderly Israelis will be more vulnerable next week as the country’s schools partially reopen, some doctors and health experts have been warning.

“We’re opening things, so people say coronavirus is over, but it isn’t over,” said David Greenberg, a leading infectious diseases specialist. “This virus is like a parasite looking for a host, and the host is humans. It jumps from person to person and the virus now has an opportunity to get back to work.”

Greenberg, head of pediatrics and the pediatric infectious diseases unit at Soroka University Medical Center in Beersheba, told The Times of Israel that when children start to return to school on Sunday after a month and a half at home, he expects significant numbers of them to become infected, and he fears that infections will be passed to their more vulnerable grandparents.

“I’m very very concerned about children infecting grandparents and others who are at high risk,” he said, adding that there is danger of them either infecting grandparents directly, or by the virus to their parents who would then transmit it onward.

The Education Ministry on Tuesday released details of its plan for the reopening of some schools starting Sunday, which government ministers green-lighted the previous day.

Children in first through third grades will return to school for five days a week, five hours every day, while kindergartens and preschools will be divided into groups of 15 to 17 that will each study half the week at school and half the week remotely.

“The classroom will be organized so every student sits at a separate table” with a distance of two meters between them, according to the plan.

For now, all other grades will continue to study remotely.

Final sign-off for the plan is dependent on the findings of a study into coronavirus infection rates among children, which will be released later this week.

Greenberg said that the danger associated with schools reopening is increased because it comes with the return of many Israelis to routine and a change in public mood. As people start to feel more relaxed about the pandemic, the elderly are more likely to agree to encounters with family, even though the government is still urging them not to, he predicted.

Like Greenberg, Cyrille Cohen, head of the immunotherapy laboratory at Bar-Ilan University, said that the reopening of schools will quickly translate into more danger to the elderly. “They will have more potential sources of infection,” he said.

Added Cohen, “If children are at school it means contamination will be easier. Infection will be passed on more and kids will bring it back home, possibly passing it on to parents who may pass it on more.”

Israeli health officials have stated since starting to scale back restrictions earlier this month that they don’t know exactly what the impact of various steps will be, and consider new spikes in cases possible. “Maybe there’s going to be another cycle and another cycle, maybe now, maybe in wintertime,” said Health Ministry Director-General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov last week.

Greenberg believes that the only way to counter the dangers arising from kids mixing with each other at school is to consider them “potentially positive unless proved negative,” and keep them away from grandparents. “It will be even more important for them not to see their grandparents and others who are considered high-risk until all of this settles down, which might be weeks and might be months,” he said.

Both Cohen and Greenberg said they support the opening of schools and other steps toward normality, but want the public to understand the consequences and do its best to minimize the negative impact.

Israeli medical professionals are closely following international research into children and the coronavirus. For example, The New South Wales Health Center for Immunization Research conducted a study on children, and concluded they are unlikely to transmit COVID-19 between each other or to adults. In New South Wales, Australia, a decision to reopen schools was said to have been influenced by that theory.

Some Israeli research is underway on the issue, and is expected to be published soon. Though it could radically change the conversation on kids, for now, Israeli doctors tend to regard children as capable of contracting and transmitting the coronavirus, as does the Health Ministry. The country’s first patient under 19 to suffer serious complications from the virus, an 11-year-old girl, is currently hospitalized at Rambam Hospital in Haifa.

Greenberg said that based on current research, families must grapple with the possibility that their children will show no symptoms at all despite being infected, as children are thought to be particularly likely to be so-called silent spreaders.

He said that this poses a particular challenge for families with members who have underlying health conditions, who could suffer badly if infected. In such families, he said, people shouldn’t automatically assume they should send kids back to school.

“People in such families should be very careful and vigilant, and talk to physicians to assess risks,” he said.