EVERY SIGNATURE MATTERS - THIS BILL MUST PASS!

EVERY SIGNATURE MATTERS - THIS BILL MUST PASS!
CLICK - GOAL - 100,000 NEW SIGNATURES! 75,000 SIGNATURES HAVE ALREADY BEEN SUBMITTED TO GOVERNOR CUOMO!

EFF Urges Court to Block Dragnet Subpoenas Targeting Online Commenters

EFF Urges Court to Block Dragnet Subpoenas Targeting Online Commenters
CLICK! For the full motion to quash: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/hersh_v_cohen/UOJ-motiontoquashmemo.pdf

Friday, July 31, 2020

42,697 Confirmed Cases of Children 0-17 Years of Age in California Infected With Covid-19! Agudah is Telling the Governor Jewish Kids Don't Get Sick only the "Other" Kids.

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Agudath Israel of California Statement on Schools

Agudath Israel of California represents the Orthodox Jewish community in the State, including more than 25 Orthodox Jewish day schools with over 7000 students in an effort to reopen K-12 schools for face to face learning in the fall. The Orthodox Jewish community fully understands the threat of the COVID -19 virus in the State of California. We place safety first in any action we take.

During the first months of the pandemic our community experienced hospitalizations, the need for long term ventilator care, and even death. Our community took strong action to follow governmental guidelines. In May we were able to reopen synagogues adhering to the state and county protocols. In July, we opened day camps, again following state and county guidelines. To date, we have had no infection traceable to our synagogues or day camps. (Flat Out Lie!)

Sadly, we have not been able to reopen our schools. From March until the end of the academic year, our students, like all students throughout the State, participated in distance learning only. Each of our schools invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a heroic effort to obtain the necessary technology, set up and train users, and to implement a robust distance learning program.

Despite these efforts, our educators feel, as do educators throughout the State, that the distance learning model was not successful. The thought of limiting instruction to home based computer learning in the coming academic year is untenable. The model is an academic failure and a financial impossibility. Many prominent physicians, including pediatricians, agree that schools can be safely opened for face to face learning if proper guidelines are followed.

We applaud the Governor’s inclusion of a waiver option in the State guidelines that would allow an elementary school to petition to reopen. We strongly contend that the waiver process should be expanded to secondary grades. There is no conclusive science to make such an arbitrary distinction. (ANOTHER LIE)

(Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, Large Study Finds:

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html)



It should also be possible for a consortium or group of schools to batch their applications and submit them together.

Agudath Israel of California wants all Californians to stay safe and healthy. Part and parcel of that is to enable our children to learn. It is imperative to allow those willing to take the necessary steps to ensure a safe learning environment, the ability to reopen schools for the coming academic year, for face to face instruction.

https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Immunization/ncov2019.aspx

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

To combat the deadly disease, even with scant resources, Hirszfeld and other Jewish doctors sponsored hundreds of public lectures, offered sanitary and hygiene courses, and set up an underground medical university to train young medical students on the co-occurring effects of starvation and epidemics.

“COVID-19“

How a Public Health Campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto Stemmed the Spread of Typhus (No Agudah "Torah Protects" intervention in Warsaw or anywhere in Europe)

 

A new study shows how life-saving efforts by Jewish doctors helped curb an epidemic during World War II

Ghetto Medical Exams
Jewish doctors give medical examinations in the Warsaw Ghetto

The Warsaw Ghetto was a horrific part of the Nazi Germany campaign to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. As millions were killed by the SS in death camps like Auschwitz, the Jews in Poland’s capital city were held captive by the German army and subjected to starvation, forced labor and disease.

To combat the spread of illness, a new study suggests, Jews within the Ghetto may have had success in using community containment efforts not unlike the social distancing efforts recommended today in the struggle against COVID-19. The historical record shows that an epidemic of typhus, a deadly but preventable bacterial disease, ravaged the imprisoned population, but then, somehow, cases dropped dramatically. 

While historians have long understood this to be the case, a new mathematical modeling study, published last week in Science Advances, brings together information from across a spectrum of sources including daily journals, government rationing records, reported case numbers and biostatics, and posits that a vibrant public health campaign was at the root of the efforts to curb the spread.

In the fall of 1940, the occupying Germany army blockaded the Polish city of Warsaw, sealing the city’s more than 400,000 Jews into a 1.3 square mile area. (For comparison, the population density of New York City is about 27,000 people per square mile.) The Germans excused and codified the containment under the guise of isolating disease-carrying individuals; Polish Jews were depicted in Nazi propaganda posters as lice, or typhus vectors.

“It's eye-opening to realize how the question of epidemics informed various decisions, including the German decision to create ghettos, and paved the way to genocide,” says Holocaust historian Tomasz Frydel, who was not involved with the study.

German officials knew enough about the spread of typhus to know that by overcrowding, starving and depriving the Jewish residents of basic necessities, the ghetto would become a breeding ground for infection. Additional food supplies were blocked until May 1941, at which point rations provided by authorities amounted to no more than 200 calories per day, per person. The starvation made fighting any disease that did emerge near impossible, and louse vectors spread easily due to a lack of adequate sanitation and an abundance of hosts.

More than 100,000 Jews were infected by typhus and at least 25,000 died directly from it. But, just before the winter of 1941, as an epidemic in the ghetto was breaking out, something remarkable happened: cases dropped exponentially when they should have continued to rise.

“My greatest surprise was realizing that the typhus epidemic died out at the very beginning of winter just when I would have expected it to accelerate,” says study author Lewi Stone, a mathematician and disease modeler with RMIT in Australia and Tel Aviv University in Israel. “For a year I thought this was likely just a corrupted dataset. But then I checked with the diary of [famed ghetto historian Emanuel] Ringelblum, who documented daily events in the ghetto, and he himself corroborated what I had seen.” 

Ringelblum wrote in his diary that cases fell by 40 percent. Stone and his team set off to quantify what happened between the time the ghetto was sealed off in November 1940, until July 1942, when it was liquidated and more than 250,000 remaining Jews were sent to the Treblinka death camp.
Modeling chart
New disease model shows predicted cases (black line) matching actual typhus cases (red line) on the left, and predicted cases if there were no intervention (right) 
The researchers used a disease model where the estimated population of ghetto residents was divided into classes representing different individuals’ disease states: susceptible, exposed, infected or recovered. They then added a disease vector factor representing lice to the equation, using a rate of spread that would emulate any sort of external factor taking hold, like preventative public health measures. The model’s total median number of simulated reported and unreported cases over the period of September 1940 to July 1942 was approximately 72,000, with a possible maximum of 113,000 cases.

 When the researchers compared their run to the actual data available from a variety of reports and medical and historical accounts from the ghetto’s records, the numbers matched. Having shown the model was reliable, they next used it to predict the trajectory of the typhus spread with a constant rate of infection, which they would expect when no preventive measures are put in place. The run showed that cases would have exceeded 190,000, an outbreak two to three times higher than what occurred.

Since the number of susceptible Jews remained relatively high during the test run period, the authors said the epidemic was unlikely to have dropped for a lack of hosts. They concluded there must be other factors at play. “And so, we hypothesized that the epidemic crashed actually due to the community's efforts, which were substantial in the end to try to bring that epidemic down,” says Stone. 

Among the Jewish public health officials working within the ghetto was epidemiologist Ludwik Hirszfeld, who co-discovered the inheritance of blood types. Hirszfeld had helped establish the National Institute of Hygiene in the Polish state that existed between the world wars and played a major role in establishing public health initiatives within the ghetto. In his memoir, Hirszfeld wrote, “typhus is the inseparable companion of war and famine… This disease destroys more people than ‘the most brilliant’ commander. It often decides the outcome of wars.”

To combat the deadly disease, even with scant resources, Hirszfeld and other Jewish doctors sponsored hundreds of public lectures, offered sanitary and hygiene courses, and set up an underground medical university to train young medical students on the co-occurring effects of starvation and epidemics. Because no antibiotic was available for typhus at the time, the best treatments included de-lousing and staying clean. Stone says doctors and public health workers encouraged people to monitor for lice, change and iron clothes and wash as much as possible. While those efforts extended throughout the ghetto, volunteer agencies took advantage of a meager influx of food that came after May 1941 and set up a feeding program that helped to moderately quell some of the starvation.

Polish Jews awaiting their turn in the ghetto soup kitchen; starvation and disease went hand-in-hand in the Warsaw Ghetto
Polish Jews awaiting their turn in the ghetto soup kitchen; starvation and disease went hand-in-hand in the Warsaw Ghetto 
Not everyone is convinced community health efforts fully explain the drop in disease. Samuel Kassow, historian and author of Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto, says the current study is provocative, but that tactics encouraged by Jewish public health workers would have been challenging to enact. Due to the lack of coal as a fuel source, buildings had no heat and pipes froze, which made washing and staying clean very difficult. “How can you have ‘social distancing’ for example, when the Germans configured the ghetto in such a way that to get from A to B to C there were narrow ‘choke points’ where masses of people had to crowd against each other,” he says. “Imagine the staircases at Grand Central at 5 p.m. if all the escalators failed at once.”

While typhus had devastating effects in the ghetto, Frydel notes ways that righteous gentiles used public health information about typhus outside of the ghetto as a means to help save Jews in hiding. “We find moving stories of rescuers using typhus to scare off the German police,” he says.

Rescuers could keep authorities at bay by telling the Gestapo that typhus-infected individuals were inside. Some Polish doctors figured out how to forge positive tests to save lives. When workers with fake typhus-positive tests showed up to a factory or forced work site, Germans sent them home to quarantine, where they had a chance to escape being worked to exhaustion.

The case of the Warsaw ghetto is not the first or only example of the interplay between politics and disease, but the study does provide illuminating evidence in favor of the efficacy of public health campaigns and the need for novel ways to assess disease risk factors, especially in light of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Lynn Goldman, the dean of George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health, says the study’s combination of history, medicine, epidemiology and first-hand accounts is rare and the methodology could be hugely important to containing coronavirus and other diseases, especially in high-risk, low resource populations.

“Around the world, some refugee camps are as bad or worse, in terms of public health, and the ability to get in there and assess what's really going on and then to control pandemics is very difficult,” Goldman says. “This kind of paper, we could use it to teach humanitarian assistance, disaster response. But also, it could be used to teach history, to teach political science.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-public-health-campaign-warsaw-ghetto-stemmed-spread-typhus-180975418/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200727-daily-responsive&spMailingID=43054427&spUserID=MTAwOTA4NTE0MjE5MQS2&spJobID=1802138283&spReportId=MTgwMjEzODI4MwS2

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Camp Shoresh Parents - Check On The Safety Of Your Children!




Campus

New Location for Summer 2020

This summer Shoresh will be in a beautiful 
spacious campus in Pennsylvania
15 Camp Wayne Road
Preston Park ,PA 18455


  • Indoor gym
  • Spacious bunkhouses
  •  football fields
  • basketball courts
  •  hockey rinks
  •  lit sand volleyball courts
  • Large dining hall
  • Lake
  •  swimming pool

Yeshivas Don't Have Unions - Only Gedolim!

"About 65 percent of public school teachers in the U.S. belong to unions, and despite the myriad challenges of teaching and learning remotely, it’s possible for them to do their jobs online."

 

The Growing Fight Against the School Death Trap

 

Teachers, bus drivers, health aides, and other school workers are organizing against a culture that is trying to feed them into the jaws of the pandemic.

 



A special education teacher at a public high school in Queens remembers a week in April when, almost every day, she learned another student at her school had lost a parent or grandparent to Covid-19. Now she fears reopening this fall—even with a hybrid learning model like the one proposed in New York—will trigger another wave of grief.


“I feel like they’re sending me back to orphan my kids,” she told me, asking to remain anonymous because she fears professional repercussions for speaking out. She misses seeing her students in person, but all the talk around opening in a masked, socially distanced, constantly sanitized environment reminds her of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” None of the plans she’s seen seem realistic for her overcrowded school, and she’s worried teachers will spread the virus to students and their families, many of whom live in multigenerational households. She lost a parent in high school and is horrified by the prospect of more kids going through the same—and feeling complicit as “a vector of death.”

With more than 144,734 Americans lost to Covid-19, teachers and school staff around the country share her worries. A recent study from South Korea found that young children can infect others, and kids over 10 can spread the virus as effectively as adults. Of course, schools cannot open without the workers who keep our education system running—teachers, bus drivers, custodians, food service personnel, paraprofessionals, school nurses, and others. Many fear that going back will put them, their families, their students, and their communities at risk. According to an Ipsos poll conducted in May, nearly one in five teachers would quit if they had to return to school this fall, and around half have considered leaving their jobs. Some are writing their wills.

A growing number of education workers are asking their school and union leaders and elected officials to postpone reopening until the virus is under control. A national movement, Refuse to Return, calls for staff and students not to come back in person “until our counties report no new cases of Covid-19 for at least 14 consecutive days,” the outer window in which experts say 99 percent of symptomatic people will develop signs of infection. Since Harley Litzelman, a high school history teacher and union organizer in Oakland, California, launched the campaign in late June, affiliated Facebook groups have formed in 26 states and the District of Columbia, and more than 80,000 people have signed the Refuse to Return petition. On July 27, local organizers are planning a Day of Action Against Pandemic Inaction, with car caravans, remote protests, and phone and email drives targeting their school superintendents and local and state officials.

Much of the discussion around reopening has worked backward from the premise that schools must provide in-person learning in some capacity. Litzelman wants to flip that logic. For him, it’s not just about refusing to put himself, his students, and his fiancée, who has asthma, at risk: It’s a rejection of the idea that Americans must “normalize the constant death of our neighbors” to keep the economy running as the pandemic rages on. While an initial call to action directly addressed teachers, Refuse to Return aims to engage nonteaching staff, parents, students, and “even people unrelated to education, because ultimately this campaign is about preventing greater community transmission everywhere.”


“It is our responsibility to exercise our power as workers to force our leaders to do what they have refused: end this pandemic,” Refuse to Return’s sample resolution reads. “Our demands are intrinsically tied to the movements for racial justice, as Black and Brown communities have disproportionately borne the brunt of this pandemic and will continue to do so if elected officials force students and staff to return to campus before it is safe.” According to CDC data, Black and Latinx people in the United States are three times as likely to contract Covid-19 as white Americans and almost twice as likely to die from it. Litzelman sees connections between the pandemic, school shootings, and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—all lethal failures of a capitalist system in which leaders “acclimate Americans to the idea that this is just something that we deal with.”

Litzelman points out teachers have more leverage to stay home than many American workers, including other school employees. About 65 percent of public school teachers in the U.S. belong to unions, and despite the myriad challenges of teaching and learning remotely, it’s possible for them to do their jobs online. 

In contrast, Sequoia, a nonunion health tech who works alongside the school nurse at an elementary school in Aurora, Colorado, is “between a rock and a hard place” this fall. If a student or staff member becomes infected, “I will be coming in direct contact with them when they come to the clinic, and I will be around them for an extended amount of time,” she said. But if her school doesn’t open for in-person learning, she doesn’t get paid.

Sequoia’s paychecks continued after the school shut down this spring, since her position was already budgeted, but her district, like many around the country, is now facing a deficit. Some of the ideas floated to reduce costs include “charging children to use the school bus, upping athletic fees, getting rid of nurses and replacing them with my position, which I think is completely crazy, especially during a pandemic.”

She and the school nurse share a small clinic and will have to borrow an isolation room from another department. If they have more than two people at the school showing symptoms, Sequoia doesn’t know what they’re going to do. But at the same time, she can’t imagine not coming back to her students if the campus opens. “It would be like abandoning the Titanic as it goes down. I’m like, that’s my ship, I’m going to go down with it,” she said.



Sequoia joined a Facebook group affiliated with Refuse to Return and has emailed Governor Jared Polis, asking him to make a decision about reopening because she feels Colorado’s school districts are dragging their feet. When the school year starts on August 17, she’d ideally like to begin remotely, despite the fact that her son, who has autism and is nonverbal, has struggled with online learning. “It is easier to bring a child back up to their level than it is to bury a child,” she said. “So if it means keeping the kids safe and they’re behind a little bit, then so be it.”

Covid-19 is already killing school workers, even before the doors open for fall. In Arizona, three teachers shared a classroom to give virtual summer school lessons. Despite wearing masks, sanitizing, and maintaining distance, all of them tested positive for the virus, and one, Kimberley Chavez Lopez Byrd, died in June. In Florida, Jordan Byrd (no relation), a 19-year-old college student who worked as a school custodian, recently died after contracting the virus. The school’s principal and his wife, who is the principal of another school in the area, both tested positive and experienced “relatively mild” cases.

“Our school family is devastated,” a teacher at Jordan Byrd’s school wrote on Facebook, according to a report in the Tallahassee Democrat, “and this occurred with no teachers, paraprofessionals [or] students on campus. If this disease spread in the school where masks were required, social distancing, and other safety measures were in place, imagine what it will look like when kids are arriving on buses, sitting in classrooms, walking the crowded halls, and eating lunch with no masks.” The Florida Education Association, which represents around 150,000 educators, including public school teachers and staff, is suing the state, arguing that returning to school before the virus is under control violates the state’s constitution.

Chuck Paquette, a veteran school bus driver near Syracuse, New York, who’s been in public school transportation for over 30 years, knows three drivers who’ve decided to retire early rather than chance their health going back to work. He says he’s no alarmist but is taking the risk seriously: Though he recovered from Covid at home in March, he deals with lingering effects and understands there’s a risk he could become infected again. Even with a mild case, “I’ve never been that kind of sick in my life.”

Paquette wonders about the logistics of going back: What happens when a kid on his bus tests positive? If he has to quarantine, will he be forced to use his sick days? Will he be given masks to hand out when students inevitably arrive at the bus stop without one? “What do I do when I’m driving down the road and Johnny says, ‘Susie took off her mask?’” he said.

In Detroit, protesters blocked school buses from transporting students to summer school, which was offered in person on a voluntary basis. Two students were confirmed positive for the virus after an activist group, By Any Means Necessary, sued, and a judge ordered the Detroit Public Schools Community District to test those attending face-to-face classes. “There should have been a foot put down, children’s lives in danger,” Todd Weems, a bus driver who quit, told Detroit TV station WXYZ.

Refuse to Return’s messaging doesn’t call for an actual strike—which is illegal for public school teachers in many states, though that didn’t stop a wave of walkouts in 2018—but Litzelman wanted the name to convey “a commitment to militant action.” While some unions, including United Teachers Los Angeles and the Chicago Teachers Union, have called for a fully remote reopening and are advocating for broader social justice policies, many “have not wanted to take as aggressive a position as the one we have.”

 However, he’s seeing the campaign language get picked up around the country, and groups including Louisiana’s Jefferson Federation of Teachers and the Santa Rosa Teachers Association in California have adopted the central demand of “14 days, no new cases” before resuming instruction in person.

Around the country, educators are drawing on their collective power. In March, the threat of sick-outs from rank-and-file teachers union members helped push New York City’s schools to shut down as the virus spread. “When I look through the literally thousands of posts in all of the different groups, we see stakeholders and school staff of all varieties,” Litzelman said. “If we all refuse to return, we will all protect one another.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/158625/growing-fight-school-death-trap?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily



Monday, July 27, 2020

Hands On Hershel Schachter Seems to Be Busy With Life Threatening Issues (Who can wash their hands?) --- Why Not Go Bold, Like... Certainly Anyone in Poor Health Over A Certain Age Should Not Fast Beyond Chatzos? In This Covid-19 Era, It is a Vadei Sakana For The Sick and Elderly...



Rabbi Shachter says that they view the virus as a Safeik Sakana, a potential danger and therefore during the present period they would be allowed to wash and use alcohol gel, whereas those who are not so stringent would be forbidden to use disinfectant or wash since during the year they rely on “Hashem preserves the simplehearted” (Tehillim 116:6). In other words one who is flippant and is careless about the other rules cannot say that he needs to wash his hands as protection against the virus. If someone is disregarding the other rules of the CDC, he cannot insist on this one, and washing would remain prohibited.

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Anybody See Chaim Dovid Zweibel?




NEW YORK - Camp Bnos announced that due to two confirmed cases of coronavirus, they are ending the first session of the summer two days early.

In a letter to parents, the administration informed the parents of their campers that due to the infections that were detected, the camp will close early, and that all who have been exposed to the infected parties have been notified and should quarantine for 14 days.

The campus, located in Ferndale, New York, has not yet determined if they will operate for the second session of the summer.

https://hamodia.com/2020/07/26/camp-bnos-closing-early-due-two-confirmed-covid-19-cases/

Friday, July 24, 2020

Some reports place children at the center of spreader events. In Israel, the number of new cases has risen from fewer than 50 per day two months ago, before schools reopened, to more than 1,500 per day now. Those numbers followed school outbreaks that infected at least 1,335 students and 691 staff. An overnight camp for 13-to-18-year-olds in Missouri closed after 82 children and staff became infected.


What Scientists Know About How Children Spread COVID-19

As communities struggle with the decision over whether to open up schools, the research so far offers unsatisfying answers

Boy gets his temperature checked
A boy has his temperature checked as he receives a COVID-19 test

Every year, children are a major driver of transmission for the viruses that cause the flu and the common cold. So this March, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, Tina Hartert of the Vanderbilt School of Medicine expected the same to be true for the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. But months later, Hartert and other respiratory disease experts are still trying to pin down the elusive virus, which has surrendered only hints about its effects on children and their ability to spread the infection.

What has become clear is that children, especially younger children, do not get nearly as ill as adults, especially older people, and rarely die from COVID-19. For example, a meta-analysis of existing studies in Pediatric Pulmonology looked at 550 cases among children under 18 in China, Italy, and Spain; it found only nine children had a severe or critical case of COVID and only one, who had underlying conditions, died.

Still, the question of how likely kids are to be vessels ferrying the infection to others remains a looming concern as school districts and states across the U.S. consider whether and how to reopen for the fall. “It's obviously one of the critical questions that we have to answer,” Hartert says. “We still don't have a lot of data.”

Hartert now leads a six-month study funded by the National Institutes for Health that looks to answer that question, among others. Called the Human Epidemiology and Response to SARS study (HEROS), it will sample 1,951 families every two weeks starting July 1. The families live mostly in urban areas like Chicago, New York and Denver, but the study also includes some from rural Wisconsin. The goal is to capture infections as they occur and track the transmissions patterns. “One of the problems with a lot of the studies that have been done is you really don't know who's infected and then who transmitted it to whom,” she says.

The first samples are being analyzed now. How informative the data set becomes depends on the subjects—whether it includes clusters of families who are infected and shows how the virus spreads. “It's a difficult thing to predict,” she says.

Elsewhere, researchers have teased out evolving and sometimes contrary answers to basic questions about COVID and kids, with only enough pieces fitting together to suggest the outlines of an image.
For one study, published in May, researchers analyzed reports from more than 600 people from two cities in China: Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, and Shanghai. In this relatively small sample size, they found children were a little more than a third as likely to be infected as adults. But children had roughly three times as many chances to become infected when schools were open, effectively canceling the difference.

Another recent study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which used data from China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Canada and South Korea, found that people under 20 were about half as likely as adults to be infected. But the researchers qualified their findings, noting that there were variations among countries and age groups. Recent data in England, they noted, found little difference in infection rates among children and adults. Nicholas G. Davies, an epidemiologist and modeler who led the study, said what happens with kids and COVID remained a mystery.

The fact that children are less likely to exhibit symptoms while infected makes the problem of determining how well they spread the coronavirus even trickier to figure out. But emerging studies and the history of the common coronaviruses being transmitted by children makes for a compelling case they can spread the COVID-19 virus.

A recent study from South Korea of 5,706 infected people and their 59,073 contacts found children under 10 transmitted less often to adults while those between the ages of 10 and 19 spread the virus as well as adults do. Households with the older children had the highest rate of spread to other members—18.6 percent— of any age group while households with younger children had the least spread, just 5.3 percent. The overall average was 11.8 percent.

There’s evidence as well that children, including those without symptoms, are as likely to be infectious. Researchers in Berlin tested more than 3,700 COVID-19 patients, including 127 individuals under 20 years old. The study found that compared to adults, kids carried the same viral load, a signal of infectiousness.

Some reports place children at the center of spreader events. In Israel, the number of new cases has risen from fewer than 50 per day two months ago, before schools reopened, to more than 1,500 per day now. (Today it reached 2000) PM 

Those numbers followed school outbreaks that infected at least 1,335 students and 691 staff. An overnight camp for 13-to-18-year-olds in Missouri closed after 82 children and staff became infected. 

Yang Yang, a biostatistician at the University of Florida’s College of Public Health, is completing a study based on nearly 20,000 households. He says his preliminary results reveal that children do infect adults, especially in the same households. “Our analysis is that children are a little bit more infectious than adults with in-house transmission,” he says, but that may just be because they are tended to by parents or grandparents in homes.

A teacher reads to children in a pre-school class practicing coronavirus precautions
A teacher in a pre-school class practicing coronavirus precautions
Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease expert at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health who has been a leading COVID-19 researcher, says it’s impossible to get a clear picture of the effects of COVID on kids right now. Shaman and his team spent two years running the Virome of Manhattan, a surveillance project similar to HEROS, which tracked infections and transmission of flu, cold viruses and the coronaviruses that cause the common cold.

They found viruses moving from schools and daycare facilities, from children to parents, something any parent who sends their children to daycare or pre-kindergarten for the first time recognizes. However, the studies to date about COVID-19 and children have been too small or too compromised by factors such as school closings, lack of testing or much smaller community caseloads than the United States. 

“The question is, what happens when the children get it? Are they effectively dead ends?” he says. “Or are they capable of communicating the virus and spreading it to other people? And I think the evidence is not conclusive. We don't know enough to know that children to some degree are less capable of transmitting this virus.”

Derek Cummings, an emerging pathogens expert at the University of Florida, says he’s not convinced by the evidence that children are less likely to transmit the disease. His work with the endemic coronaviruses, relatives of SARS-CoV-2, shows that children are infected with their first coronavirus by three and get all four of the common coronaviruses by 20. “Every other coronavirus infects kids and transmits among kids,” he adds, “so why would we assume this one doesn't?”

Hartert says that the research indicating children may not as often transmit the virus would, once again, make SARS-CoV-2 an outlier. She noted that studies show children are shedding a similar amount of COVID-19 virus as adults, which would suggest they were equally capable of transmittal. “So there are a lot of things that would make it surprising if we find out that children are less likely to transmit the virus,” she adds.

Back to school
Shaman says he understands the need to get children back to school, but it's hard to gauge the risk given the current state of knowledge and information slanted by governments looking to reopen schools. “We don't have a policy model and an experience model that allows us to understand what will be appropriate,” he adds. “We're dealing with a novel coronavirus. We don't fully understand how children are involved in the transmission cycle.”

Hartert, a former high school teacher, said that schools need to reopen for a number of reasons, including mitigating the inequities of staying at home for low-income students who need support for things like meals and after-school care. But in her opinion, reopening should only happen in states and communities where the virus is under control. (Other countries have reopened their schools, but only after the virus had been subdued and often with limited class sizes.)

“There aren't many other countries that have opened schools while rates of the virus are increasing exponentially,” she says. “If you live in a region where there's more spread of the virus, it's a lot more likely that you have an outbreak from a teacher, parent, or child who brings the virus to school.”

Mitigation strategies like masks, social distancing and ventilation need to be in place as well. “We're going to have to weigh the risks and benefits with the amount of data that we have at the point which we have to make decisions about opening schools,” she says. “We've got to get our kids back to school and we've got to open daycares for essential workers. I think everyone wants to do that. But it's not as easy as just mandating that it happen.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-scientists-know-about-how-children-spread-covid-19-180975396/?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=&spMailingID=43028347&spUserID=MTAwOTA4NTE0MjE5MQS2&spJobID=1801840301&spReportId=MTgwMTg0MDMwMQS2

Thursday, July 23, 2020

As Israel Struggles Desperately, Aryeh Deri Opens Up Israel's Borders To Foreign Students Come September. Follow The Money!

Israel Isn't Prepared
for the Second Wave
Alternate text
The second wave has completely devastated Israel and the government’s handling of the situation has been a subject of criticism. The state's contact tracing system is failing, their economic stimulus plan is inadequate, their healthcare system is overwhelmed, their food distribution efforts are insufficient, and the economy is in ruins after a long lockdown with another one around the corner. As a result, the number of Israelis facing economic hardship and can't provide food for their families is growing, rapidly.
Active Cases in Israel
Alternate text

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

The case of accused child sex offender Malka Leifer has tarnished the image of Torah and the image of Israel in the world


The Burning Talmud 

The case of accused child sex offender Malka Leifer has tarnished the image of Torah and the image of Israel in the world
Family members of Malka Leifer, an Ultra orthodox teacher wanted in Australia for child sex abuse, arrive for a court hearing at the District Court in Jerusalem on July 20, 2020. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90
Family members of Malka Leifer, an Ultra orthodox teacher wanted in Australia for child sex abuse, arrive for a court hearing at the District Court in Jerusalem on July 20, 2020.

 
The burning of the Talmud is a powerful image. Next week, as many Jews fast on Tisha be-Av, we will read a dirge composed to commemorate the destruction of as many as ten thousand Talmudic manuscripts in Paris in 1242.

But yesterday I was hoping that a certain volume of Talmud would burst into flame. It was in a Jerusalem courtroom, on the table of the defense counsel for Malka Leifer, captured by my friend Ittay Flescher for Plus61J Media, which covers the Jewish world for an Australian audience. Leifer is facing 74 counts of child abuse from her time as an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school principal in Melbourne, and this was her 69th hearing since three sisters came forward a decade ago to tell their harrowing story of victimization at her hands. 

So whose Talmud was it? Her longtime lawyer Yehuda Fried brought the gigantic ArtScroll edition (Pesachim, Volume I, it appears) to peruse while her new counsel Nick Kaufman (famous for fighting extradition for Serbian genocidists and Muammar Gaddafi’s kids) used the opportunity to blame the victims. Yes, they were minors, but they almost weren’t. Who’s to say these 16- and 17-year-old students weren’t really the ones at fault? To extradite Leifer for a trial that will determine her guilt or innocence, the Israeli courts must first find her guilty! And she’s such a pious woman, how could she maintain her religious standards in an Australian prison?

These arguments are patently ludicrous, and hopefully Judge Chana Miriam Lomp will reject them. But they do so sound awful… Talmudic. The Talmud is often criticized for sophistry, for picayune dissection of impossible abstractions. However, some of the wildest theoretical discussions in the Talmud have turned out to be essential over the millennia. A flying tower crossing over a graveyard, a flying camel ferrying witnesses from one far-flung location to another, a cow giving birth to a donkey, a woman getting pregnant from a bath – these all seemed ridiculous until we developed analogous technology.

But that is the difference between a beit midrash and a beit mishpat, a study hall and the halls of justice. In a courtroom, we are dealing with real people, not teasing out theoreticals.

Am I arguing that Malka Leifer does not deserve a fair trial with a vigorous defense? Not at all; that is what awaits her in Australia. In Israel, it has all been about fraud and denying justice by delaying justice. This 69th hearing was the first extradition hearing, as the previous 68 were about feigning various forms of illness, mental and otherwise, aided and abetted by too many in the ultra-Orthodox community, up to and including our (recently former) Minister of Health Yaakov Litzman, whom the police have recommended indicting for his part in the affair. This case has tarnished the image of Torah and the image of Israel in the world. A hillul ha-Shem, desecration of God’s name, in every sense of the term.

And let’s not forget what the Talmud symbolizes for Orthodox Jewish women, which include not only the accused and the victims, but the presiding judge as well. Until recently, the Talmud was a symbol of patriarchy, a part of Jewish tradition controlling nearly every aspect of the lives of Jewish women but which they were forbidden to open. Only in the mid-20th century did this begin to change, and in many parts of the Orthodox community, especially the ultra-Orthodox sects, it hasn’t really changed at all. So when Fried peruses his Gemara while Kaufman proffers klutz kashyas that even Hillel the Great wouldn’t have entertained, this sends a message of intimidation, telling women that they will never be equal. Or even heard.

As our Sages might have said: Better that the words of Talmud be burnt than that they be used to oppress and to victimize.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-burning-talmud/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2020-07-21&utm_medium=email

Monday, July 20, 2020

Perfect For The 3 Weeks - No Worries it's Not Music!


Bobov-45 Rebbe Composes Niggun in Honor of Previous Rebbe’s Yahrtzeit

Bobov-45 Rebbe Composes Niggun in Honor of Previous Rebbe’s Yahrtzeit
Boro Park - The Bobov-45 rebbe has composed a new niggun in honor of the 20th yahrtzeit of his sainted zeide, Rav Shlomo Halberstam of Bobov zt”l.

The niggun, on the words of Menucha Vsimcha was taught to the chassidim on Shabbos, which marked the Shabbos before the rebbe’s yahrtzeit.


 

Friday, July 17, 2020

This Is The Reason Boro Park 24 Gives For The Drug Overdose: "The non-Jewish men were employed at a Jewish camps that was forced to operate as a day camp because of Covid rules in New York. They took advantage of the children leaving on a trip and overdosed on the illegal substances. In Other Words, If This Was An Overnight Camp, These Guys Would Never Have Overdosed :-)


Workers at Jewish Day Camp in Serious Condition After Drug Intake



Kiamesha - Three workers at a Jewish day camp are in serious condition after they overdosed on drugs while the children were away from the grounds.

The non-Jewish men were employed at a Jewish camps that was forced to operate as a day camp because of Covid rules in New York. They took advantage of the children leaving on a trip and overdosed on the illegal substances.

Volunteers from the Catskills Hatzolah and other emergency first responders treated the three workers on scene and then transported them to a regional hospital.

Thursday, July 16, 2020

This is our second chance. We won’t get a third. If we don’t get the growth of this pandemic under control now, in a few months, when the weather turns cold and forces people to spend more time indoors, we could face a disaster that dwarfs the situation today.

The Pandemic Could Get Much, Much Worse. We Must Act Now.

A comprehensive shutdown may be required in much of the country.
 

When you mix science and politics, you get politics. With the coronavirus, the United States has proved politics hasn’t worked. If we are to fully reopen both the economy and schools safely — which can be done — we have to return to science.

To understand just how bad things are in the United States and, more important, what can be done about it requires comparison. At this writing, Italy, once the poster child of coronavirus devastation and with a population twice that of Texas, has recently averaged about 200 new cases a day when Texas has had over 9,000. Germany, with a population four times that of Florida, has had fewer than 400 new cases a day. On Sunday, Florida reported over 15,300, the highest single-day total of any state.

The White House says the country has to learn to live with the virus. That’s one thing if new cases occurred at the rates in Italy or Germany, not to mention South Korea or Australia or Vietnam (which so far has zero deaths). It’s another thing when the United States has the highest growth rate of new cases in the world, ahead even of Brazil.

Italy, Germany and dozens of other countries have reopened almost entirely, and they had every reason to do so. They all took the virus seriously and acted decisively, and they continue to: Australia just issued fines totaling $18,000 because too many people attended a birthday party in someone’s home.

In the United States, public health experts were virtually unanimous that replicating European success required, first, maintaining the shutdown until we achieved a steep downward slope in cases; second, getting widespread compliance with public health advice; and third, creating a work force of at least 100,000 — some experts felt 300,000 were needed — to test, trace and isolate cases. Nationally we came nowhere near any of those goals, although some states did and are now reopening carefully and safely. Other states fell far short but reopened anyway. We now see the results.

While New York City just recorded its first day in months without a Covid-19 death, the pandemic is growing across 39 states. In Miami-Dade County in Florida, six hospitals have reached capacity. In Houston, where one of the country’s worst outbreaks rages, officials have called on the governor to issue a stay-at-home order.

As if explosive growth in too many states isn’t bad enough, we are also suffering the same shortages that haunted hospitals in March and April. In New Orleans, testing supplies are so limited that one site started testing at 8 a.m. but had only enough to handle the people lined up by 7:33 a.m.

And testing by itself does little without an infrastructure to not only trace and contact potentially infected people but also manage and support those who test positive and are isolated along with those urged to quarantine. Too often this has not been done; in Miami, only 17 percent of those testing positive for the coronavirus had completed questionnaires to help with contact tracing, critical to slowing spread. Many states now have so many cases that contact tracing has become impossible anyway.

What’s the answer?

Social distancing, masks, hand washing and self-quarantine remain crucial. Too little emphasis has been placed on ventilation, which also matters. Ultraviolet lights can be installed in public areas. These things will reduce spread, and President Trump finally wore a mask publicly, which may somewhat depoliticize the issue. But at this point all these things together, even with widespread compliance, can only blunt dangerous trends where they are occurring. The virus is already too widely disseminated for these actions to quickly bend the curve downward.
To reopen schools in the safest way, which may be impossible in some instances, and to get the economy fully back on track, we must get the case counts down to manageable levels — down to the levels of European countries. The Trump administration’s threat to withhold federal funds from schools that don’t reopen won’t accomplish that goal.

 To do that, only decisive action will work in places experiencing explosive growth — at the very least, limits even on private gatherings and selective shutdowns that must include not just such obvious places as bars but churches, also a well-documented source of large-scale spread.

Depending on local circumstances, that may prove insufficient; a comprehensive April-like shutdown may be required. This could be on a county-by-county basis, but half-measures will do little more than prevent hospitals from being overrun. Half-measures will leave transmission at a level vastly exceeding those of the many countries that have contained the virus. Half-measures will leave too many Americans not living with the virus but dying from it.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, almost every city closed down much of its activity. Fear and caring for sick family members did the rest; absenteeism even in war industries exceeded 50 percent and eviscerated the economy. Many cities reopened too soon and had to close a second time — sometimes a third time — and faced intense resistance. But lives were saved.

Had we done it right the first time, we’d be operating at near 100 percent now, schools would be preparing for a nearly normal school year, football teams would be preparing to practice — and tens of thousands of Americans would not have died.

This is our second chance. We won’t get a third. If we don’t get the growth of this pandemic under control now, in a few months, when the weather turns cold and forces people to spend more time indoors, we could face a disaster that dwarfs the situation today.

John M. Barry is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and the author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.”

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

In the Name of Religious Freedom....Just ask the Agudah & the Jewish Camp Owner$!



Holy Fight Ministries Loses Cockfighting Religious Freedom Lawsuit

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


From Judge Brian A. Jackson's opinion yesterday in Plumbar v. Perrilloux (M.D. La.):
[T]he Louisiana Criminal Code … makes it unlawful for any person to … "organize or conduct any commercial or private cockfight wherein there is a display of combat or fighting among one or more domestic or feral chickens and in which it is intended or reasonably foreseeable that the chickens would be injured, maimed, mutilated, or killed."
Plaintiffs … argue that the burden imposed on their religious practice of cockfighting is at odds with the Louisiana Preservation of Religious Freedom Act ("LPRFA"). They adequately summarize the core of their argument in the following syllogism: "[i]f the use of peyote, a Schedule I drugs [sic], is permitted…then it stands to reason that an exception should be carved out…for the Plaintiffs and their congregation [to engage in cockfighting] to practice their faith." …

Several photographs taken during a police raid were offered by [the government]. The photos depicted a cockfighting arena littered with discarded food and alcohol containers; a handwritten betting ledger; "cockhouse" fees and membership rules; rooster corpses; and other indicators of a commercial cockfighting operation. Signs were discovered in the area, including one reading "Milk Dairy Game Club House Rules," and another smaller sign reading "Holy Fight Ministries"—apparently the only indicator of any religious object in the facility. At oral argument, Plaintiffs argued that while they lease the premises from the Game Club, they are not a commercial operation and were not present the night of the raid when the incriminating evidence was seized….

[Plaintiffs] are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claims [1] because Defendants have provided satisfactory evidence to show that the state has a compelling interest in enacting a law banning cockfighting and [2] because the evidence casts doubt upon the type of institution operated by Plaintiffs. In other words, the evidence suggests that the cockfighting activities were more commercial in nature than a bona fide religious ritual….
Read the Comments: My Favorite so far: 

It is not the job of the courts to question one’s religious beliefs. This is a disgusting attack on freedom of religion.


https://reason.com/2020/07/14/holy-fight-ministries-loses-cockfighting-religious-freedom-lawsuit/#comments