No news is NOT good news

For background, click here to review my previous post

While the public has heard no news about the conditions of ill residents at two branches (Aleh Gedera and Aleh Negev) of Aleh's four large closed institutions, we did learn of yet another Covid-19 outbreak there. 

This time it was the intensive care unit at Aleh Negev where a nurse tested postitive. The worrisome announcement was,predictably, given a postitive spin on Aleh's website with lines like these: 

"During the evacuation from the ward, the ALEH staff and volunteers took the youngest residents – babies and toddlers – to the playground to alleviate their anxiety and keep them calm. Testing is ongoing and will take longer than usual due to the fact that so many of the ward’s residents are very young and require consistent intensive care. Following the testing, the residents and staff members will be quarantined in the newly sterilized ward until the results are analyzed and any additional infected individuals are identified." [Source: Aleh]

Needless to say, that should be alarming. 

Those children need not have been enclosed in such a dangerous setting; a large, isolated institution. Residents are in close contact with each other and with the many staff members, rendering it a petri dish for the Covid-19 virus. 

With government funding, many if not most of these children would have been living where they belonged: With their own or an adoptive family!

In addition, there has been no news about the brand-new hospital that Aleh's spokesman, Doron Almog, promised us. Two weeks ago he stated unequivocally (as I posted here) that Aleh committed to constructing one in the Negev within one week. To date, nothing of the sort has materialized. 

No big shock. Vacuous, hyperbolic statements are an Aleh trademark.

Bizchut, the leading advocacy organization for people with disabilities in Israel, has embarked on a campaign to win visitation rights for parents of children locked up in institutions like Aleh. During the scourge of Covid 19, most have been barred from seeing and comforting their anxious children.

In its recent circular, Bizchut wrote:

"Institutions and hostels have announced they are no longer allowing visitors. No-one can enter and no-one can leave. This, despite the fact that for many persons with disabilities, interaction with relatives is essential to their mental and sometimes physical well-being. We also know that in some of these facilities instances of neglect and abuse have been exposed. With the reduction in external staff going in and out, relatives are the only people who can observe and report on what is going on behind the walls of these isolated facilities" [Soure]

Learn more about what has been occuring in large, closed institutions for people with disabnilities since the Covid 19 outbreak [see Institutions and some viral lessons not yet learned]