The Health and Tourism ministries on Tuesday agreed not to postpone the plan to allow vaccinated tourists into the country starting on May 23. Earlier in the day, the Health Ministry said it would ask the government to postpone the plan by a month.
Instead, the Health Ministry is seeking to restrict travel from high-risk countries, such as India, South Africa, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Turkey, Brazil and Mexico. It was set to bring its recommendation before the government, which was expected to approve them later on Tuesday.
“The airport entrance, even for the vaccinated, can be a port for mutations, for variants, which is deadly dangerous,” Health Ministry Director-General Chezy Levy told The Jerusalem Post. “You cannot have people go in and out and have no barrier, no gatekeeper from the world.”
Israel has to prevent variants that could cause coronavirus to spread across the country again, he said, adding: “We are really nervous that the opening of the skies could bring us back to where we started.”
According to Health Ministry recommendations, all nations will be classified into two groups. The current regulations will continue to apply for “tier 1” countries, while a new set of rules will be introduced for high-morbidity “tier 2” countries.
Israelis will not be allowed to travel to those destinations except in very limited circumstances. In addition, all those who have visited them within the previous 14 days will be required to enter quarantine – even if they are vaccinated or have recovered from the coronavirus. Foreigners from these countries who enter Israel will need to self-isolate in a state-run facility.
The list of tier 2 countries, which currently includes all nations for which Israel issued a travel warning last week, will be updated every two weeks based on criteria that include the presence of variants of concern, such as the Indian one, and the numbers of people traveling to Israel from those nations. The procedure will be similar to the one used to classify red and green countries before traveling was completely banned in January.
“We decided to divide the world,” Levy told the Post.
Health officials can tell the difference between a dangerous and an innocuous variant, he said.
The Indian variant is challenging the efficiency of the Pfizer vaccine, meaning it could potentially break through the protection it provides, Levy said.
“Every plane that came from India to Israel in the last two weeks had infected people,” he said. “And these were people that were supposed to have a negative PCR test. I hope they were not forged or fake.”
Some experts are optimistic that the vaccine is effective against the variant.
“The Indian variant contains 13 mutations, and we are familiar with the important ones among other variants,” Eran Segal, a computational biology professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, told Channel 12 on Tuesday. “We already know that vaccines are effective against them, and our assessment is that they will also be effective against this variant, although we still do not know it for sure.”
According to the outline presented by the Health and Tourism ministries at the beginning of the month, starting on May 23, vaccinated tourists are going to be able to enter the country for the first time in more than a year. They will need to present a negative PCR test before boarding their flight and undergo another PCR test upon arrival, as well as a serological test to prove the presence of antibodies.
In the first phase, only tourists traveling in groups are going to be allowed in. Individual tourists will be able to start traveling to Israel starting on July 1 if the epidemiological situation remains good.