Almost half of Israel’s coronavirus cases originated in the educational system, according to a government report submitted to the Supreme Court on Thursday, Ynet reported. The report was submitted to the court following a lawsuit filed last week by a national parent leadership group demanding that 7th to 10th graders be allowed to immediately return to their classrooms. Students in 7th to 10th grade, the only Israeli students still at home, are scheduled to return to school on March 7 in green, yellow, and orange areas. “The Health Ministry is aware of the difficulty created by the fact that students in grades 7-10, unlike children in lower grades, have studied the fewest amount of days during the past year in an in-person format,” the state wrote.

Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, the head of the Health Ministry’s Public Health division, warned about a rise in seriously ill young coronavirus patients in the Chareidi sector, Kikar H’Shabbos reported on Thursday. Dr. Alroy Preis’s warning comes on the background of a lower vaccination rate in the Chareidi sector than that of the general population. “We would very much like to see an increase in the vaccination rate in the Chareidi sector,” Alroy-Preis said. “Twenty percent of Chareidim aged 50 and older still haven’t been vaccinated, in comparison to 5-6% of those above 50 in the general population.

Regulators in the U.K. and four other countries plan to fast-track the development of modified COVID-19 vaccines to ensure that drugmakers are able to move swiftly in targeting emerging variants of the disease. Previously authorized vaccines that are modified to target new variants “will not need a brand new approval or ‘lengthy’ clinical studies,” Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said in a statement. The new guidance was issued jointly by regulators in the U.K., Australia, Canada, Singapore and Switzerland. The guidelines build on the model already used to modify the flu vaccine in response to continual changes in that virus.

A national panel of vaccine experts in Canada recommended Wednesday that provinces extend the interval between the two doses of a COVID-19 shot to four months to quickly inoculate more people amid a shortage of doses in Canada. A number of provinces said they would do just that. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also expressed optimism that vaccination timelines could be sped up. And Health Canada, the country’s regulator, said emerging evidence suggests high effectiveness for several weeks after the first dose and noted the panel’s recommendation in a tweet. But two top health officials called it an experiment. The current protocol is an interval of three to four weeks between doses for the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines.

Slow off the blocks in the race to immunize its citizens against COVID-19, Germany faces an unfamiliar problem: a glut of vaccines and not enough arms to inject them into. Like other countries in the European Union, its national vaccine campaign lags far behind that of Israel, Britain and the United States. On Wednesday the government gave in to growing calls in this country of 83 million to ditch the rulebook that many have blamed for holding Germany back. “We want to use all flexibility,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said after lengthy negotiations with state governors in Berlin on adjusting pandemic measures.

Israel’s death rate rose by about 10% in 2020, according to a report published on Monday. The report by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies stated that “although this is a significant increase, it is lower than the increase in other countries,” and lower than could have been predicted to result from the pandemic on the Israeli population. At the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic hit Israel, Israel’s death rate was at a record-low level, the report said.

Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, the head of the Health Ministry’s Public Health division, told the coronavirus cabinet on Tuesday ahead of the decision to reopen Ben-Gurion Airport, that opening Israel’s borders without restraint could lead to catastrophe by allowing in multiple coronavirus variants. “We are seeing a lot of variants out there, not just from New York,” she said. “We need to ensure that we don’t find ourselves in a catastrophe within a month and then ask ourselves why we allowed people with variants in.

The Palestinian Authority’s decision to divert some of its stockpile of coronavirus vaccines to senior officials, soccer players and others has sparked controversy, feeding into long-standing concerns about corruption as it struggles to respond to a worsening outbreak. The PA has repeatedly said that its first vaccines would go to medical workers and elderly patients, who are at greatest risk of severe illness or death. But to date it has only acquired enough doses to inoculate 6,000 people in a population of nearly 5 million. “We have focused from the beginning on health workers, but there are around 100,000” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Health Minister Mai Alkaila told reporters on Tuesday.

Austria and Denmark have further dented the European Union’s already fragile coronavirus vaccine solidarity by announcing plans to team up with Israel to produce second-generation vaccines against COVID-19 variants. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz plans to visit Israel with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen later this week and confer with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on vaccine research and production cooperation. Kurz said Tuesday that his country and Denmark intend to stop relying solely on the European Union for coronavirus vaccines. As part of its strategy, the EU has six contracts for more than 2 billion doses of vaccines, with Moderna, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer-BioNTech and CureVac.

Israel may need to enter a fourth lockdown ahead of the March 23 election, coronavirus czar Prof. Nachman Ash said in an interview with Radio 103FM on Wednesday morning on the background of a worrying rise in Israel’s basic reproduction number [how many people each carrier infects]. “We’ll have to see the data in the next couple of weeks,” he said. “It’s definitely a possibility that we will recommend a fourth lockdown before the election.” Israel has begun reopening its economy, with further restrictions scheduled to be lifted on Sunday. And while the infection rate and the number of seriously ill virus patients on Wednesday were the lowest since December, the basic reproduction or R number has increased to 1.