Parents scramble for COVID testing kits ahead of school on Thursday

• Published date: 29 September 2021
• Author: MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN

The government ruled during the holidays that no student in preschool through sixth grade can return to school after Sukkot break without a negative result - 1.5 million students.

On Wednesday, the last day of the break, Magen David Adom said it will set up around 400 complexes with the testing kits so parents can come and collect them. Students who are not screened will be sent home. If parents cannot come to pick them up, they will be isolated in a room separate from the other children.

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The last time parents were asked to screen their kids before school started, some 8,000 cases of the virus were identified.

Meanwhile, Pfizer has submitted the data from its Phase II/III clinical trial to the American Food and Drug Administration with a request for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of a lower dose of its vaccine for children ages 5-11, the company said in a release on Tuesday.

The data was shared for initial review. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in interviews in the US that he did not want to preempt any final decision by the FDA but that he believed the data looks good and "hopefully they will give the OK so we can start vaccinating children hopefully before the end of October."

In this Pfizer clinical trial, there were 2,268 children between the ages of five and 11 who have received two doses of 10 micrograms of the company's coronavirus vaccine, each 21 days apart. Within one month after the second dose, the antibody responses of the participants were comparable to those recorded in previous studies of people ages 16 to 25, the company said. The older cohort, however, received 30 micrograms.

Health Ministry Director-General Nachman Ash celebrated the news on Tuesday night, though he told N12 in an interview that Israel would wait for the EUA approval of the FDA and then discuss the data itself before giving the shots to children. Ash said vaccinating children will be "important" to help stop the spread of the virus, although data in recent days is indicating that the infection rate could be on the decline.

There were 5,159 people diagnosed with coronavirus on Monday, the Health Ministry said Tuesday after the holiday, with a positivity rate of only 3.87% – the lowest in months. The number of serious cases was at 660 – up from 641 before the holiday...