We’ll see Meron’s effect on coronavirus next week, health official says
It was easier to impose a national lockdown than differentiated policies, Tomer Lotan, executive director at the National Coronavirus Taskforce, tells Post.
By ROSSELLA TERCATINUltra-Orthodox Jews look at stairs with waste on it in Mount Meron, northern Israel, where fatalities were reported among the thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered at the tomb of a 2nd-century sage for annual commemorations that include all-night prayer and dance, April 30, 2021.(photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS)
Overseeing the corona pandemic in Israel has been a mirror of every problem the country faces, according to Executive Director of the National Coronavirus Task Force Tomer Lotan.“Managing the pandemic is not a matter of public health but rather a matter of public policy since health issues interact with the economy, education, daily life of people, and more,” he said. “In my position, I have found myself dealing with the Temple Mount, the Bedouin in the desert and the Palestinians illegally crossing into Israel to work.”Deep-rooted aspects of Israeli society, such as inequality, political instability, and specific characteristics of different sectors and communities have all posed challenges in fighting the disease – and also played a role in the Meron tragedy. The stampede that claimed the lives of 45 people, and the reason why the outline prepared by the Health Ministry to contain the risk of morbidity was ultimately never approved, represent several complex issues within Israeli society.“What happened had nothing to do with corona,” Lotan said. “However, what we did notice throughout the discussion was that nobody was in charge of the area. About a week before the event, we created an outline that was agreed upon by everybody, including the police, Religious Affairs Ministry, Interior Ministry, and Religious Sites Authority. However, when we sent the regulations to the various ministries, a new disagreement emerged – completely operational – about who would be in charge to limit the access to green pass holders and to the number of people agreed upon. Nobody accepted taking responsibility for it.”Tomer Lotan. (Photo credit: Courtesy)
Lotan said he was worried about possible repercussions of the large gathering on the morbidity in Israel, as some 100,000 people were at the Meron site.“We have to wait until mid-next week to see what happens,” he pointed out. “It is important to say though that in the past two-and-a-half months, since we started lifting restrictions, things have gone amazingly well, even after events with very dense gatherings.”After 15 years spent working in the public sector and politics, including at the Education Ministry and as chief of staff for former Labor leader Avi Gabbay, Lotan was brought in last summer to fight against the pandemic by former coronavirus commissioner Prof. Ronni Gamzu, and has continued to serve under the current commissioner, Prof. Nachman Ash.Lotan has been instrumental in several major policy projects, such as the traffic light system and the green pass outline. He said that the traffic light system – which rated municipalities based on several criteria, including the morbidity and later the vaccination rate – has been especially challenging to implement.“It was much easier for us to approve a national lockdown,” Lotan said. “Passing measures that differentiate between groups always creates disputes: all the demons come out, and you start to see restaurants versus hotels, schools versus malls, religious versus secular, and so on.
“Ultimately, the only sector where we have been successful in implementing the traffic light system was the education sector. For the commercial sector we failed. What I believe is even more important however, is that we created a national language based on the colors, as well as incentives for local authorities to improve the situation of their city. This way we recruited 250 mayors to work with us. In addition, the indicators of the traffic light system have been useful in many other aspects, for the police, the Home Front Command, the healthcare providers and so on.”The political instability has also made managing the pandemic more complicated, said Lotan, as it is hard for politicians to make decisions on severe restrictions that might cost them popularity.He said health authorities have been aware of the tensions surrounding basic rights that managing the pandemic has created.“Every decision we made involved a lot of deep thought about other rights we might be violating,” he said. “However, there are two aspects to consider: the cost of every mistake has been huge, and contrary to other human rights at stake, managing the pandemic has been a matter of life and death. For these reasons we have chosen a conservative approach.”Lotan said that the lack of a functioning government and Knesset is the reason why Israel has not started to implement the electronic bracelet project for enforcing quarantine requirements on returnees from abroad, which the Health Ministry described as a fundamental tool to prevent new variants from spreading.Regarding the airport, where government policies for a long time prevented people from seeing loved ones and citizens from returning, Lotan said that the entire past year must be considered in context: after the Fall, the morbidity spiked due to many Israelis traveling abroad.“We went from a moderate policy to a very strict policy very fast,” he admitted, a reference to the end of January when Israel completely shut off its borders for several weeks. “It took us a while to find the right balance in the field of border restrictions, which I believe is the situation that we have now.”Has Israel left corona behind? According to Lotan, it could be, but there are no certainties.“As long as the rest of the world is still suffering so badly because of the disease, as long as there is the chance that a new variant emerges, it is hard to say that we are past it,” he concluded. “However, it does seem that Israel has found the right recipe to go beyond COVID.”
