With over 30% of its population vaccinated, Israel is fighting Covid-19. However, the appearance of several infectious variants overwhelms his hospitals, showing the long road that the rest of the world follows.
After inoculating 82% of Israelis aged 60 and up, going in a close monthly blockade and closure of the national airport this week, Israel indicates that the end of the tunnel could be further. This hopes for a rapid global recovery, driven by the vaccine, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment in Davos to make Israel a test case for how quickly Covid can be shot in the reopening of economies.
A nurse is administering a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at a mass vaccination center in Tel Aviv on January 4.
Photographer: Kobi Wolf / Bloomberg
“We see a wave of infection that refuses to subside, apparently due to the mutation,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein told a news conference on Thursday.
As the European Union struggling to get adequate supplies of vaccines and the US is pushing for more gunfire, the Israeli situation is proof of the difficulty of fighting a virus whose ability to move quickly keeps it one step ahead of efforts to contain it.
People who went through the vaccination cycle accounted for 2% or less of those hospitalized, said public health chief Sharon Alroy-Preis, adding that “they were certainly more protected.” However, not enough people have completed the inoculation cycle to draw conclusions about the vaccine’s effectiveness, Ran Balicer, head of the national team of Covid-19 experts, told Ynet television.
The so-called British variant, 50% more infectious and possibly more virulent than the original virus, is to blame for the inability of the vaccination campaign so far and the blockade to stop the spread, Israeli health ministry officials said.
Although the vaccine is thought to work against the British version, the more contagious nature of the mutation means more infections and therefore more hospitalizations. The main goal of the Ministry of Health is now to reduce the number of seriously ill people who are overwhelming hospital wards and exhausting medical teams.
The infection rate in Israel fell to just over 9% from 10.2% earlier this month, and the number of seriously or seriously ill people has stabilized at around 1,100. The number of patients with respiratory tract has reached a record, said Commissioner Corona Nachman Ash. More than 4,600 people in Israel have died from the virus, and more than 7,600 people are diagnosed with it daily.
Balicer said it would probably take another 10 days for the country to see a decline in critical cases, allowing the economy to return to normal.
Netanyahu has set a target for inoculating all Israelis over the age of 16 by the end of March.
“The faster we vaccinate and the faster the population goes to get vaccinated, the faster we can bring the spread under control,” said Hezi Levi, director of the Ministry of Health.
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