JERUSALEM: The massive increase in COVID-19 infections in Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries on earth, points to a complicated path for the United States.
In June, there were several days with zero new COVID infections in Israel. The country launched its national vaccination campaign in December last year and has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 80% of citizens over the age of 12 fully inoculated. COVID, most Israelis thought, had been defeated. All restrictions were lifted and the Israelis again held mass parties and prayed in places without masks.
Fast forward two months later: Israel reported 9,831 new cases diagnosed on Tuesday, at a distance from the worst daily figure ever recorded in the country (10,000) at the peak of the third wave. More than 350 people died from the disease in the first three weeks of August. At a press conference on Sunday, the directors of seven public hospitals announced that they could no longer admit any patients with coronavirus. With 670 COVID-19 patients in need of critical care, their wards are overflowing and staff is at a breaking point.
“I don’t want to scare you,” Dr. said this week. Salman Zarka, tsar of the coronavirus, in the Israeli parliament. “It simply came to our notice then. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t lie. “
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What happened?
The complex and disturbing truth is that no single policy or event brought Israel to this crisis, Hagai Levine, a professor of epidemiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told The Daily Beast. A deadly set of circumstances came together to place Israel on the precipice, most of which can be summed up in: “We are still in the middle of a pandemic and there is no silver bullet.”
“All vectors have influenced the increase in morbidity,” he said.
But the main causes of Israel’s current situation are the dominance of the extremely infectious Delta variant, which Israelis were returning from foreign holidays in the country during the weeks when Israel left all restrictive measures, along with the worrying decline in the effectiveness of the vaccine after about six months.
Israel vaccinated its population almost exclusively with the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, which received full FDA approval on Monday and remains the gold standard for the prevention of serious diseases due to coronavirus.
“It is not an Israeli problem. It’s everywhere.”
But in early July, with citizens over 60 vaccinated almost completely, Israeli scientists began to observe a worrying increase in infections, if not serious illnesses and death, among people vaccinated twice as much.
People fully vaccinated with weakened immune systems appeared to be particularly vulnerable to the aggressive Delta variant.
In mid-July, Professor Galia Rahav of Sheba Hospital began experimenting with reinforcing shots for cancer patients, transplants and hospital staff. A group of 70 elderly Israelis vaccinated with transplanted kidneys they were the first to receive a third dose.
The success of Rahav’s attempts to boost immunity around the sixth month contributed to the Centers for Disease Control’s decision, announced last week, to begin offering booster shots to Americans in September.
In order to reduce serious illness and death toll from VOCID and avoid a fourth national blockade, Israel has launched an aggressive effort to provide all adult reinforcements in a matter of weeks.
Starting this week, all Israelis over the age of 30 will be able to receive reinforcements. By the end of the month, they are expected to be universally available to all people over the age of 12 who received their second vaccine five months or more ago.
Israel will then reconfigure its green passports, granting them only to triple-vaccinated people and limiting their validity to six months. In anticipation of this change, the number of unvaccinated Israelis receiving their first shots has tripled since early August.
The World Health Organization has called on rich countries to stop all third vaccines for a period of two months, in the hope that a moratorium will allow the poorest countries to recover, where few citizens have received even the first inoculation. . The United States rejected the call and Israel ignored it.
Asked what has led Israel to the highest transmission even though the country has already provided third doses of vaccines to 1.5 million citizens, Rahav, who has become one of the most well-known faces of public health messages. Israel, sighed saying, “I think” You are facing a very nasty virus. That is the main problem, and we are learning it in the most difficult way. “
“It’s a combination of declining immunity, so inoculated people are reinfected and at the same time the transmissible variant of Delta,” Rahav said, adding that the Israelis did not have the discipline to return to use. of masks as the numbers began to rise. “But it’s not an Israeli problem,” he added. “It’s everywhere.”
Its conclusion should pause the U.S. authorities, which are facing school reopening, as, at best, only 50% of eligible adults have been fully vaccinated.
“We can all learn from other countries, but you can’t copy and paste methods from other countries.”
Unlike New Zealand, which aims for zero transmission of the coronavirus to the community, and imposes blockades when even a positive case is identified, the Israeli authorities have opted for a model they call “living with a crown.”
“Israel is truly a pioneer,” said Levine, the former president of the nation’s Association of Public Health Physicians, referring to the country’s innovative vaccination campaign and ongoing efforts to completely reopen schools on September 1, remaining in place. measures aimed at preventing school-driven outbreaks, such as the one that closed the nation last summer.
“We have come up with a plan that is not airtight,” Zarka, the coronavirus tsar, told a local radio station. “It is clear that there will be cases of illness in schools … [but] closing down at home and closing the school system is not exactly the solution. “
He has called on the government to impose stricter restrictions on the size of cultural and sporting events until the incidence of coronavirus decreases.
“Each country has to assess its own epidemiology,” Levine said, “its culture, its public health, the public’s confidence in its health authorities.” Referring to New Zealand, he added that “we can all learn from other countries, but you can’t copy and paste methods from other countries.”
Israel was forced to make quick decisions and at a time of great uncertainty. Levine was one of the public health officials who expressed doubts about the wisdom of Israel’s untested step toward booster vaccination nationwide, but told The Daily Beast that the latest statistics, which show that only 0.2 of the first 1.1 million recipients of the third time they became infected with the coronavirus, proving it had been a “brave decision.”
The past week has shown a significant reduction in morbidity among Israelis with three vaccines over the age of 70, the first group to receive reinforcement.
Like other experts, Rahav supports the reopening of schools, but noted that thanks to the upcoming Jewish holidays, which will close schools around 80 percent of the country, Israel will once again be in a unique position to serve as a huge laboratory.