Maj. Gen. Roni Noma, who is coordinating the fight against the Coronavirus in the Chareidi sector, called on the public to stop attempting to be ‘smart alecs’ and abide by the lockdown rules: “We now have an opportunity to reduce morbidity.”
During a press conference, Noma told reporters that “until a week ago, the Chareidim were below average in severely ill patients who die. Now that statistic has risen to equal the average.”
Noma added that the impression that there are thousands of yeshiva students who are ill with the virus and are walking around the community infecting everyone is simply false. “We did a lot of testing so there is an increase in morbidity.”
“The number of verified people in the Chareidi community is more than 21,000. The “corona hotel” shortage is real. More than 5,000 people in the Chareidi community have evacuated to hotels so far,” Noma said.
When asked if there is a phenomenon of people deliberately becoming infected in order to be evacuated to a coronavirus hotel, Noma said that he “does not know the scope. It should be condemned. Our mechanisms allow us to locate people who do not need to be evacuated to a hotel.”
The total number of Chareidim ill with the virus surpasses 21,000 out of a total of 69,000 ill in the country. Thus the Chareidi community accounts for almost one-third of all the ill patients in the country.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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6 Responses
I’ve heard from various sources that many chilonim don’t get tested and go wherever they feel like. When a relative’s co-worker looked unwell and she asked why she’s coming into work and risking infecting others, she answered in anger. “So what if maybe I have corona! Who’s going to pay my salary if I stay home?” So those who are actually being tested show up as covid positive in disproportionate percentage to their population size.
They are not patients. They are not sick.
“If they could find this virus in you at all, and with PCR if you do it well you can find almost anything in anybody. It’s starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else, right I mean cause if you can amply one single molecule up to something which you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there’s just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of in your body. OK. So that can be thought of as a misuse of it, just to claim that it’s meaningful….Those tests are all based on things that are invisible and the results are inferred in a sense. PCR is separate from that. It’s just a process that is used to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you are sick and it doesn’t tell you that the thing that you ended up with really was going to hurt you or anything like that.”
Kerry Mullis, Inventor of the PCR, Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, talking about PCR and its use as a diagnostic tool for HIV. Mullis died last year before the start of the COVID-19 crisis.
Israel tests at a very high rate of magnification. The MIQE (“Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments”) guidelines have been developed under the aegis of Stephen A. Bustin, Professor of Molecular Medicine, a world-renowned expert on quantitative PCR and author of the book A-Z of Quantitative PCR which has been called “the bible of qPCR.” In a recent podcast interview Bustin points out that “the use of such arbitrary Cq cut-offs is not ideal, because they may be either too low (eliminating valid results) or too high (increasing false “positive” results).” And, according to him, a Cq in the 20s to 30s should be aimed at and there is concern regarding the reliability of the results for any Cq over 35. ISRAEL TESTS AT a Cq of 37!
The real question is the proportion of households infected because by a chiloni house hold there’s being 4-5 people infected vs by a chareidy family it can easily be 10 or more. So that can obviously make it look like it’s more rampant in the chareidy community even tho proportionally it may be the same.
Don’t Observant Jews represent 1/3 of the people living in Medinat Yisrael? I mean, kharedim aren’t the majority. The idea that we are 1/3 of the cases means that it is an accurate representation of the community. I am pretty sure many Arabs have it. Though, personally, I care about my nation first, so I’m not as concerned about that.
They probably announced that chareidim have disproportionately higher number even before they checked the statistics. Because this is what they want the world to believe. Fake news.