During the first wave of the novel coronavirus, East Jerusalem was barely hit. Unfortunately, as noted here and here, this time around, the picture is vastly different.
Examples of posts
The MiniActive network of 1,000 Palestinian women from East Jerusalem is rising to the call. In addition to videos that were made and disseminated on Facebook (you can read about that here), they are also helping in a citywide effort to establish an Arabic-language website that will collect all the relevant information from numerous sources in one space.
Part of this effort includes a question and answer section, which will be uploaded to the site. Until now, they’ve raised 19 questions, and all the relevant bodies are in the process of answering them.
Questions include: “Why are there people who manage to cancel the forced quarantine?”
This refers to a public process whereby residents receive SMS messages, “You’ve been found to have been near someone who was diagnosed with COVID-19. You must self-quarantine at home until XXX date.” These messages are based on contact tracing methods, and legally require anyone who receives them to self-quarantine at home until the noted date. The answer to the question? If you can prove that you were NOT at that particular place at the particular time noted (While this method has been largely successful, there are sometimes mistakes.), and the person who you were supposed to have been in contact with is NOT a close family member or other member of your household, then the quarantine can be cancelled.
Another question: “If a person was diagnosed with COVID-19, how are the rest of the members of the household supposed to be checked? Are they to go to a local testing station or to have Magen David Adom test them at their homes?”
The answer – they need to have MDA come to their homes to test them. As soon as one family member is diagnosed, they must not be going out of the house so as not to spread the disease even more.”
Here are posts from MiniActive’s Facebook page telling about these Q&A sessions:
And many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and to Natan for their ongoing support of MiniActive!
