New study shows five US Jewish communities far below herd immunity

• Author: Shira Hanau
• Published date: 11 March 2021
• Date: 11 March 2021
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

A paper published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, a peer-review journal that is open to the public, concludes that the coronavirus was spreading widely in Orthodox communities across the country last spring around that Jewish holiday — before public health warnings were given about the dangers of large assemblies.

The paper was peer-reviewed, meaning that its conclusions have been scrutinized and accepted through a rigorous process. Now its authors — four Orthodox Jewish physicians who engineered a study of thousands of blood samples from Orthodox Jews who contracted COVID-19 spanning five states — say their paper has lessons as public health officials steer Americans through the pandemic's next phase.

"There should be specific recommendations for each religious and ethnic community," said Dr. Israel Zyskind, a pediatrician in Brooklyn and one of the authors. "They should be culturally sensitive, which is not something we've seen with the pandemic, especially early on."

Dr. Avi Rosenberg, a renal pathologist at Johns Hopkins University and another author of the paper, said for Purim in particular, "the guidance all came a week too late."

"The mask mandate followed Purim, the national lockdown followed Purim, the announcement of COVID as a pandemic followed Purim," he said.

The paper is the first publication to come out of a research project started by three Orthodox Jewish doctors who decided early in the pandemic to turn a tragic turn of events — the extensive spread of the coronavirus in Orthodox communities around Purim — into an opportunity to learn more about the virus through research. Through their project, which they called the "Multi-InstituTional study analyZing anti-CoV-2 Antibodies" — or the MITZVA cohort — they collected thousands of blood specimens that would go on to be used in 10 research labs for virology studies related to COVID-19 in addition to their own paper published Wednesday.

For the originators of the MITZVA cohort, the findings are an embodiment of the good deed they hoped to bring about last spring and a corrective to some of the negative press that some Orthodox communities have received for violating of public health guidelines.

"The point of this whole effort was to make a 'kiddush Hashem,' to show we care about our neighbors," Zyskind said, using the term for sanctification of G-d's name. "And we came out by the thousands to do that."

The most important finding in their paper...