Is the Delta variant a new virus or is it just that labeling it as such makes its unexpected mismanagement easier to swallow?
According to former MK Izhar Shay, who served on the country’s coronavirus cabinet, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is trying to trick the public into believing that a new virus has entered Israel: The Delta “virus.”
On Wednesday evening, Bennett referred to the coronavirus as the Delta virus throughout almost his entire public address. But in one sentence he slipped and referred to the pandemic by its real name.
“Immediately afterwards, he quickly corrected himself and called it by the name his PR people advised: the Delta virus,” Shay said.
According to the former MK, Bennett and Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz appear to have been advised by their public relations team a couple of weeks ago to try to make this shift in order to justify the challenges they are facing in fighting the pandemic.
On Sunday at the launch event of the country’s rapid testing network, Horowitz, too, referred to the Delta variant as a “new disease.”
“Bennett has significant political issues because he went against his declarations by joining [Alternate Prime Minister Yair] Lapid, building a coalition with [Arab MK Mansour] Abbas, and disappointing his right-wing voters,” Shay said. “He also said it would take him five weeks to deal with eliminating the pandemic … and that the previous government did not have a clue how to deal with it.”
Now that Bennett is in charge, cases are soaring and he appears to have lost control of the virus.
“He has had to change the terminology so people absorb this as a different situation,” Shay said, “that this is a different pandemic, not the COVID-19 pandemic, and he has to learn everything from the beginning.”
Shay said he feels that this change in language could confuse the public, who is already perplexed by how Israel went from the vaccination nation to be on America’s list of high-risk countries in only a few months. The notion of variants is an important lesson for the citizens, as it is likely that even after Israel beats this wave of coronavirus, another variant would enter the country and wreak havoc again.
However, this is not the only rabbit that Bennett has pulled out of his hat.
In the last couple of days, the cabinet’s definition of “living alongside the coronavirus” has finally become clear: Bennett and his team equate the health and economic aspects of the crisis.
“We have to know how to accept severe cases and also to accept deaths because this is a pandemic and in a pandemic people die,” Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said earlier this week in a TV interview with Channel 13.
Similarly, Bennett in his Wednesday address expressed how both the loss of life and the loss of livelihoods equally cause him great pain.
“This cabinet has taken a position that is different from the prior cabinet,” according to Shay. “The previous cabinet emphasized saving lives and putting the health of the public as its highest priority. This cabinet emphasizes more the balance between the economic and health aspects - this should have been clear to the Israeli public.”
He said that “if the Israeli public understood 60 days ago that the government was willing to sacrifice Israeli lives to keep the economy going if the public had absorbed and understood that decision, I think many of us would have acted in a more responsible way because no one is really watching what we do.”
Finally, Shay said, this coronavirus cabinet was bound by so many “statements, declarations, speeches and critiques” that they put out against the handling of the pandemic by the Netanyahu administration that it has hindered their ability to take action.
“Now, they changed positions and they have to adapt to not only putting out critiques but making decisions,” Shay said.
He believes that this baggage partially caused the cabinet to be so slow in rolling out any substantial restrictions and if they had acted “much earlier” by putting appropriate limitations in place then the virus would not have once again spun out of control.
“There was no reason to get to the point that we may or may not succeed in preventing a lockdown,” Shay stressed. “I have heard too many experts saying this now between luck and praying to God. Praying is not a business plan.”
During his time on the coronavirus cabinet, Shay was often referred to by analysts as one of its only qualified members. Since leaving politics, he has been serving on the board of a number of biotech companies, including ones that he said are "developing breakthrough pharma drugs that have the potential to help a lot of people with severe disease.”
Shay told The Jerusalem Post he has maintained daily contact with health officials and is closely tracking the pandemic data like he did when he was in office.
Health officials are now predicting that Israel could see as many 2,000 serious cases within a month - numbers that could sound alarmist, but that Shay said make sense if nothing changes.
“What happened over the last 40 days is that we went through four times multiplying our numbers. At the beginning of July, there were 25 serious patients. At the beginning of August, there were more than 200 - so we went from 25 to 50, from 50 to 100, from 100 to 200, and from 200 to 400 in 40 days. If the rate continues, we’ll go from 400 to 800 and then be at 1,600 by September 1 - and 10 days later, we may hit more than 3,000,” Shay explained.
But this is assuming that nothing changes.
The government passed a series of new restrictions on Wednesday night and more people are getting vaccinated, so the hope is that the numbers will start to go down instead of up. Though he noted that due to the nature of the virus, the next 10 days to two weeks are already decided by the country’s inaction up until now.
“The critique is that the experts told the cabinet the same thing in July when we had 25 cases,” Shay stressed. “They said that if the government does nothing this would happen; we knew from the previous waves.”
But Shay said he hopes that as the government better settles in, they will make faster and more pointed decisions.
“It took this cabinet some time to put its act together,” he said. “But there is hope. I do believe that we can stop this.”