“There is room for optimism,” Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said in a Facebook post on Friday after his ministry updated that the country’s reproduction rate had dropped to 0.8.
The reproduction rate or “R” is the number of people a sick person infects. It has been declining for several days now, Friday morning reaching the target that decision-makers had said previously would halt the spread of coronavirus.
“The low reproduction rate provides sufficient safety margins to prevent the resumption of the outbreak as a result of the opening of the education system,” a team of Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers who advise the government said Friday in a report.
However, by Saturday night, the Health Ministry reported that the R had started to creep up again, hitting 0.85.
“The morbidity rate has shifted from spreading to stopping,” said Horowitz. But he added, “The fourth wave is not behind us.... It is too early to celebrate, and we need to be very careful, but if we continue to act in the same way, we can get through this wave.”
The Health Ministry said Friday that there were 7,812 new cases the day before out of 120,000 people who were screened. The positivity rate stood at 6.31%. On Saturday night, the Health Ministry said some 9,725 were infected the day before out of more than 150,000 people tested – a positivity rate of 6.57%.
The number of severe patients – which had been 672 on Friday – rose to 696. There were 186 people who were intubated. The death toll stood at 7,337.
This could be a result of partial data reported by the hospitals to the Health Ministry during Rosh Hashanah, as the Hebrew University researchers noted could be the case in its report – something that generally happens around holidays and then is retroactively corrected.
More than 155,000 students and close to 4,000 educational staff are isolated due to the virus, the Health Ministry reported Friday.
The rapid antigen testing operation carried out by parents of schoolchildren ahead of September 1 was successful and helped in the early detection of positive cases, the Hebrew University researchers said. They recommended that tests be performed again after the Sukkot break and that parents be provided with additional antigen tests to use in preparation for winter illnesses.
Although Israel is seeing a decline, the daily rate of patients is still relatively high per capita. As such, France and Switzerland on Friday announced tougher restrictions on Israelis entering the country, joining Portugal, Sweden and Holland.
Israel had been on France’s “green” travel list and has now been moved down to its “amber” list. As a result, beginning Sunday, only vaccinated visitors will be allowed to enter France.
Starting Monday, only vaccinated travelers or children under 18 traveling with vaccinated travelers will be allowed to enter Switzerland.
Finally, The Jerusalem Post confirmed that there was a malfunction in recent days at coronavirus testing complexes being operated by the Home Front Command, which led thousands of tests to come out positive that likely should not have.
After tests are performed at the complexes they are sent to laboratories across the countries for development and arrive in complete pallets. According to the Post’s sister paper, Maariv, the tests that reached a certain lab in Jerusalem revealed that 150 complete pallets turned out positive. The chance that thousands of tests will come out positive is extremely low, so all the tests had to be sent to another lab and re-checked while the citizens to whom the tests belonged remained in isolation.
The Home Front Command responded to an inquiry by the Post with the following statement: “The Home Front Command operates PCR testing complexes throughout the country. A technical fault with the test robot was discovered yesterday [Friday] in one of the laboratories where the samples are tested. The fault was addressed, and the test results were sent to citizens.”
Horowitz stressed that “living alongside coronavirus” is not a slogan but a crisis management strategy. At the same time, he said, it would not mean compromising citizens’ health.
“We have become accustomed to the health minister pushing for lockdowns,” he wrote. “The consequences of such aggressive measures are also very severe. Only now are we beginning to understand the magnitude of the impact of the closures – the surge of referrals to welfare services, depression, addictions, mental health and other unrelated illnesses, tens of thousands of families struggling to stabilize financially.”
He said, “All of this does not appear in the graphs and coronavirus data, but it is an integral part of our health and national resilience.”
Horowitz stressed the need for vaccination – some 2.8 million Israelis have received a third shot, according to the Health Ministry – but also for restoring public trust.
“The sectoral management, selective enforcement, protections, personnel considerations and cloud of corruption that characterized the previous government severely hampered [Israel’s] crisis management,” the minister said. “All of this is ancient history.
“Only with the entire public’s full cooperation can we maintain life and routine,” Horowitz concluded.