The new testing COVID arrangements, which were announced by Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, are a mistaken and defective step that strengthens the principle of health for the rich only and abandons people to deal with the problem themselves. Instead of increasing accessibility for tests in a public framework, by strengthening the teams in the laboratories and opening additional testing centers, the government has placed the responsibility on the public.
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The government has ordered most of the population to carry out home antigen tests, which they have to pay for themselves, so a family with two or three children will be forced to spend hundreds of shekels each month, an economic burden that will be especially felt among underprivileged socioeconomic groups.
Moreover, home antigen tests are thought to be less reliable than PCR tests. This means that people won't just be paying for the tests themselves, but in many cases, those infected with COVID-19 will receive inaccurate results, will think they are negative, and will continue to infect others.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who believes in a free-market economy, said test prices "will in any case drop in the near future because the market will be flooded with the millions of testing kits that will arrive in Israel." This policy stands in sharp contrast to what is customary around the world. For example, in France and Portugal testing kits are funded by the state and distributed to the citizens. But here? Here the government decided to privatize responsibility for the tests.
One of the main conclusions from the two years of the global fight against the pandemic is the need for strong public health systems and decisive and coherent government intervention. However, the prime minister and the entire government are refusing, as a result of their worldview, to apply these lessons, and are dragging their feet in taking the necessary steps required to curb the pandemic. The rate of vaccination among children is low, and the government hasn't succeeded in increasing it, among other reasons because of disagreements among its members. Faced with the rapid increase in infected people, the Ministry of Education hasn't done any preparation for learning in capsules.
Similarly, in the last two years, sufficient effort wasn't taken to install ventilation systems in classrooms and to reduce class sizes – two steps that would have reduced the infection rate among children. This is also the responsibility of the current government, but it's mainly the responsibility of the previous, Netanyahu-led government. And of course, the body that is stubbornly opposed to public investment in the health system is the Finance Ministry's professional echelon, which has not allowed the reality to influence its neoliberal world view.
The government is simply doing too little: while it's known that wearing masks in closed spaces reduces the chances of infection, there is hardly any enforcement of proper usage. Despite knowing that the Omicron variant is two or three times more infectious than Delta, the government refused to limit large crowds, mainly because it didn't want to compensate the owners of venues and the owners of independent businesses from the culture and nightlife industries.
But there is hope. Two days after the start of the new arrangement began, and in light of the increasing public criticism, Bennett announced that three testing kits would be given free to families with children at kindergarten and elementary school, and to their teaching staff. But it's too little and too late: the real solution is quality public testing for everyone. Significant investment in health and education, after years of budgetary neglect, is not only the only way to best deal with the pandemic but a necessary step so that all of us will be able to live in the kind of society we deserve to live in.
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