In about three weeks Israel will be almost free of coronavirus restrictions if the epidemiological situation continues to improve, Health Ministry officials said Wednesday, as the country registered fewer than 100 new cases for the fourth day in a row.
“A week from Thursday, the green pass outline will not include any additional limits,” Deputy Health Minister Yoav Kish said while addressing the Knesset plenary that had convened to approve the new regulations and to extend the existing ones. “In my estimation, if the disease continues to decline, in three weeks from today we will remove the restrictions completely... and that is an amazing achievement,” he added.Some 86 new cases were identified on Tuesday, with less than 0.3% of the 34,000 tests performed returning a positive result. The figures are in line with those from previous days. The number of serious patients and active virus carriers in the country also continued to drop, standing at 132 and 1,651 respectively. At the peak of the pandemic in January there were 1,200 serious patients and tens of thousands of active cases.Head of Public Health Services Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis told The Jerusalem Post that she is not sure Israel will lift “all restrictions,” but removing the majority of the rules in Israel is part of a holistic plan being prepared by the Health Ministry.“The plan is to make the border more controlled,” she explained. “To close from the outside and open as much as we can from the inside. The infection [rate] is really coming down, but one really does depend on the other.”She added that “closing the borders” does not mean shutting down the airport again, but rather using hard criteria of testing, isolation and electronic bracelets, as well as making sure that Israelis are not traveling to and from places with high infection or suspicious variants.On Tuesday, the government was meant to vote on Health Ministry recommendations that would require all travelers entering the country from any of seven high-infection states to enter isolation, whether they were vaccinated or not. Although the government met late it did not discuss the plan but is expected to rule on it later this week.Alroy-Preis reminded the Post that green pass establishments are currently operating at between 50% and 75% occupancy and what could change in three weeks is that they would operate at 100% with participants who are either vaccinated, recovered or can present a negative coronavirus test result.“We need to create this island,” Alroy-Preis said. “We have had such a huge achievement and we do not want to lose it by allowing infection to come in from the outside.”Regarding the electronic bracelets, she said that the Health Ministry is ready to implement the plan by next week, but is waiting for the government to make a formal declaration about the program.During the Knesset plenary, New Hope MK Yifat Shasha-Biton, a former Likud member and former head of the Knesset Coronavirus Committee, criticized the head of the Knesset Arrangements Committee, Likud MK Miki Zohar, for not allowing the establishment of a new committee.“MK Miki Zohar is not ready to form a corona committee, so there really must be no corona anymore,” she said. “If this is the case, let’s abolish all restrictions.“However, if the coronavirus still exists – and I believe we still need to govern this pandemic – we must set up a corona committee in the Knesset that can discuss government decisions,” she said.Kish responded that the government will support the establishment of the committee as long as its head will be appointed from a party that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.