Coronavirus Commissioner Prof. Nachman Ash expressed his optimism at the decrease in coronavirus patients on Wednesday morning, as 3,055 new cases of coronavirus in Israel were reported for Tuesday by the Health Ministry.
Ash retracted his previous statement regarding the chance of another lockdown before the elections.
"I am satisfied with the current state of the numbers," he said.
As of Wednesday morning, the number of patients in serious conditions dropped to 653, the lowest since December. Some 215 of them were on ventilators.
Another positive development is that the R rate, measuring the ability of the disease to spread, stood at 0.95, marking the second consecutive day with a decrease.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, some 5,936 people have succumbed to the virus in Israel.
On the vaccination front, just over five million Israelis have received at least one shot including some 3.9 million receiving both.
“The coronavirus is not behind us,” Public Health Services head Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis said during a press conference on Tuesday where she addressed the Knesset Law and Constitution Committee, adding however that she hoped that the statistics continued to be encouraging and that Israelis can have a quasi-normal life even as COVID is still present in the country.
She explained that the Health Ministry is also working on a system to ensure that schools can remain open as much as possible, while the number of schoolchildren who test positive or have to enter isolation due to exposure to a patient continues to grow.
On Wednesday, the ministry published an update about the localities which are going to be allowed to reopen schools on Sunday, and those which will need to go back to remote learning, according to the traffic light program. The former include Dimona and certain neighborhoods in Jerusalem; the latter certain neighborhoods in Bnei Brak and Beersheba.