The Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, warned this Sunday that a “storm” of tens of thousands of daily infections of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus “is arriving these days” to the country. This Friday, anticipating the dark forecast, the government began to apply a fourth dose of the anticovid vaccine to vulnerable people.
In the last two weeks, daily cases in Israel increased from 700 to 4,197, figure reported this Sunday by the Ministry of Health. “These are numbers that the world has not known and that we have not known either”the president warned at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
“The storm is coming to us these days,” he lamented in that sense. According to a report prepared by an expert who advises the Government and that was delivered this Sunday to the cabinet, Between a third and a quarter of Israelis are expected to contract COVID-19 in the next three weeks.
Most, noted Weizmann Institute expert Eran Segal, He won’t find out given the paucity of evidence affecting Israel. “From a certain point – 20,000 or 30,000 infections per day – we will ignore the numbers because we don’t have enough tests. The whole test system is collapsing,” Segal said.
The peak of infections “will only stop when almost all those who could be infected have become infected”Segal explained to the Ynet news portal, pointing out that as “it happens in the rest of the world,” the restrictions will not be enough to stop the Omicron variant. The Director General of the Ministry of Health, Nachman Ash, agreed that the herd immunity of the Omicron variant was the most likely outcome of the current wave.
The amount of “severe cases simultaneous “coronavirus, on the other hand, will not exceed the current record of approximately 1200, Segal stated. The opinions of other experts are similar: in an optimistic prediction, there would be between 1,250 and 1,750 critically ill patients, only slightly above the current record, and a more pessimistic scenario anticipates between 2,000 and 2,750 such cases, which would exert enormous pressure about the health system.
Hospitals warned that, although in previous waves the system managed to deal with 1,200 simultaneous serious cases, this time the staff is already overloaded due to a flu outbreak and a growing number of quarantined health workers.
The Prime Minister of Israel, meanwhile, assured that the Government is trying to find solutions in the midst of the overflow registered in the test sites and pointed out that the government’s goal is “to allow the economy to function as much as possible, while protecting the most vulnerable”.
Israel accumulates about 1.4 million cases and 8,244 deaths from coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic. In the last 24 hours, according to figures provided by the Ministry of Health, 4,197 new cases were registered.
Faced with that scenario, The country launched this Friday a campaign for the administration of a fourth dose of anticovid vaccine to vulnerable people, hoping to mitigate the effects of a new wave of infections caused by the spread of the Omicron variant.
The doses are administered at Sheba Hospital, located in Ramat Gan, in the outskirts of Tel Aviv, to people who have had, for example, heart transplants. Also, this hospital started giving a fourth dose to its healthcare workers on Monday, as part of a test.
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