Following a Covid-19 death at Aleh, a troubling silence

Children in a video clip posted by Aleh [Source]

It is a tragedy - but not a surprising one.

The population of Aleh's several institutions, totaling at their count over 850 children and young adults, are inherently high-risk for contracting Covid-19. Aleh's administration itself describes them as having "complex disabilities" and as being "at high risk for succombing to the virus".

Here is what Forbes magazine wrote about this segment of society:

"The people most often cited as being at serious risk are largely, by some definition, people with disabilities. While simply having a disability probably doesn’t by itself put someone at higher risk from coronavirus, many disabled people do have specific disabilities or chronic conditions that make the illness more dangerous for them." [Source]

When these individuals are congregated in large, confined groups and with rotating caregivers, they are obviously placed at even higher risk for the virus. 

That risk then rises exponentially when youths are invited into those large, closed institutions to replace regular staff members - as Doron Almog boasts of having done [in this Hebrew-language Ynet interview], 

As we are all now aware (perhaps excluding Almog), those untrained teenage volunteers could be asymptomatically infected, highly contagious and therefore capable of spreading the virus to their vulnerable charges!

Despite reports of three separate outbreaks of Covid-19 within Aleh's walls (two in Aleh Negev and one in Aleh Gedera), there have been no updates about the conditions of the ill Aleh residents from Aleh itself. 

After boasting about the exemplary sanitization operations at Aleh and of his success in enlisting those scores of volunteers, untrained 17 year olds to care for our most vulnerable citizens, Almog has gone inexplicably mum.

He hasn't even conceded that his promise on March 25 to set up a hospital for Covid-19 patients in Israel's south within one week was utter nonsense [here - and archived here].

On April 14, we learned from a single news report that a 41 year old Aleh resident passed away of Covid-19. The news source (my  translation from the original Hebrew) added: 

"After all residents of the institutions were tested at the request of the Aleh chain it emerged that more than one fifth of the residents, 26 out of 117, are sick with Corona. Nine of those are still hospitalized in hospitals throughout the country, 12 have been transferred for treatment for mild Corona within the welfare framework and four recovered in the hospital and have returned to the instituion. Ten staff members were also infected with the virus." [Source: Ynet] 

Meanwhile for Aleh's PR team, it is business as usual. Its sites and Facebook page sport their routine, inane "feel good" photos and video clips intended to inspire in its supporters compassion, guilt and, naturally, a reach for the wallet. 

And these days, Covid-19 is utilized to heighten what Aleh calls its urgent need for donations: "When Kids Can’t Go On an Outing, Bring the Outing to Them (March 17, 2000)".

As recently as several hours ago, the Aleh Facebook page posted a clip [here] about the home garden of one its staff members! After that it was photos [here] of Mimouna "fun" at Aleh Jerusalem. 

The catastrophe of Covid-19 is teaching us myriad crucial lessons about how we have conducted our lives. But will those include one regarding the lives of people with disabilities? 

Will Israel finally acknowledge the fact that these citizens need a better, safer, more loving and more inclusive environment than is offered them in large, closed institutions like Aleh's?

Will our government finally resist the pressures exerted upon it to provide nearly all of Aleh's annual funding?

It is high time our leaders joined the rest of the developed world in shuttering up those institutions and re-directing that money to caring for those citizens in the settings they deserve: in their families' homes, in adoptive homes or in small in-community group homes.

Let's hope Covid-19 will be the wake-up call that our abandoned children with disabilities have so desperately awaited?