Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the rest of the Government and several Israeli military and civil officials conducted an exercise on Thursday to assess the country’s response capacity to the emergence of a new variant of the coronavirus, the Prime Minister’s office reported. describing it as “the next war”.
In the drill, those responsible, gathered in the bunker that houses the national crisis management center, near Jerusalem, had to deal with various situations: massive detection and vaccination campaigns, imposition of curfews, closure of the international airport Ben Gurion, etc. The drill script featured a fictitious strain, “Omega,” which bypasses the vaccines that Israel released at a record pace this year. Omega also sickens children, largely safe from the real virus, leading to mass hospitalizations and school closings.
“What I have learned is that if you prepare for the next war and not for the previous war, the next pandemic and not the previous pandemic, that means that you are going to be better prepared,” Bennett told Reuters from the facilities at Colinas. of Jerusalem.
“Israel is safe and protected (against covid-19). To maintain this situation and the normal course of life, we must continue to monitor the situation and prepare for any situation,” he explained.
Overcome the fourth wave
With a test positivity rate of 0.65% and a steady decline in the number of new infections and hospitalizations in recent weeks, Israel appears to have weathered the fourth wave of coronavirus.
More than 5.7 million Israelis (about 80% of adults), of the country’s more than nine million inhabitants, received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and more than 4 million the third dose, according to the ministry of Health.
The advisory council of the Ministry of Health also recommended on Wednesday night to extend the vaccination to children between 5 and 11 years old.
The government has yet to decide whether to go ahead with this measure, but on Thursday the prime minister already ruled in favor.
Israel will report the findings of the drill to foreign leaders, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, next week.
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Bennett said that, to enhance the challenge of the one-day exercise, he had been kept unaware of the specific scenarios of an imagined 10-week crisis that begins during the December holidays. As part of the simulation, Bennett said he had ordered that Israeli children, including his four, be confined to their homes while the government closed the borders and consulted with the Palestinian Authority, officials from Gaza and Jordan.
“Unlike a war-war game, a pandemic war game is not secret. On the contrary, we want to share the information,” he said.
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