Israeli authorities have started to carry out serological tests on 100,000 of their citizens, one of the largest screening campaigns in the world, to prevent “second wave“Covid-19 disease, said a senior official Thursday.
These tests aim to measure “collective immunity»Of the Israeli population and to determine the people most likely to be affected in the event of a new wave of contamination. “We have started (…) and it should not take too long before we can identify interesting trends“Doctor Yair Schindle, a senior official in the intervention force set up by the Israeli government to manage the end of the pandemic, said on Thursday.
In parallel, the authorities are also carrying out tests on specific groups in the “risk areas– especially in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, the main incubators of the crisis in Israel – and among medical staff who treated people infected with the new coronavirus. “We are trying to find out (by these tests) how many of these people have been exposed to the virus and how many have developed antibodies“Says Dr. Schindle, also co-founder of aMoon, an Israeli venture capital fund specializing in biomedical start-ups.
The issue of immunity is still under debate, the World Health Organization (WHO) having estimated at the end of April that it did not exist “no proof»That people already infected and cured be protected against a new infection. If the authorities have accelerated deconfinement in recent weeks, they are nevertheless preparing for a potential “second wave”Of contamination this winter or even before.
In total, they bought 2.5 million kits for these tests. They will be carried out by the four health insurance funds offering health care to the entire population, in order to facilitate the gathering of these epidemiological data, according to Dr. Schindle. It is the largest national survey in the world, he says. A country of around nine million people, Israel has recorded more than 16,800 cases of coronavirus, including 281 deaths, but with a low death rate (31 per million inhabitants) compared to other countries.
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