Coronavirus: Indoor mandatory masks could be back on Sunday – official

In addition, the Health Ministry invited Ashkelon residents to get tested after traces of the Delta variant were found in the city’s wastewater.

“Our recommendation is to start wearing masks indoors already now,” Coronavirus Commissioner Prof. Nachman Ash said. “Next week, it will be mandatory.”

Earlier in the week, the government announced that if the weekly average of daily cases was to exceed 100, they would restore the obligation to wear masks in closed spaces. As of Thursday morning, the figure stood at 75, up from 58 on the previous day and 45 on Tuesday.

Some 138 new cases were identified on Wednesday, and as of 11 p.m. the new virus carriers registered on Thursday were already 183, the highest since April. Last week, new daily cases varied between three and 46.

While Israel has registered over 100 cases for several days in a row, the figures remain just a fraction of the new patients identified every day during the darkest months of the pandemic in the winter, which numbered in the thousands.

The centers of the new outbreak have been several schools, including in Binyamina and Modi’in. In light of the number of infected people, Binyamina was classified on Thursday as red according to the ministry’s traffic light system used to monitor the pandemic indicators of all municipalities in Israel, marking the first time that a city turned red in months. According to reports, the authorities are considering canceling all informal education activities in the town.

As of Thursday, 330 children and 30 teachers were positive to the virus, with a few thousand in isolation.

In total, the number of active cases stood at 789 after it had dropped below 200 in recent weeks. At the peak of the pandemic, 88,000 people were infected.

Residents of Ashkelon were asked to get tested for coronavirus if they were experiencing any symptoms such as fever or coughing after the Health Ministry said it found traces of the Delta variant in the city’s wastewater.

The Health Ministry’s national lab for environmental virology has been surveying the city’s sewage as part of an early-detection project since around February, according to the head of the lab, Dr. Itay Bar-Or.

He told The Jerusalem Post that the traces of the virus in the sewage surprised the ministry and raised concerns that city residents have been infected with the virus, despite there being no confirmed cases as of yet.

“There are no known asymptomatic or symptomatic cases in Ashkelon and yet we still got the traces of the virus in the sewage, so it suggests that there are people that have the virus,” Bar-Or explained. He said he expects cases to go up once people are screened.

The ministry program has been monitoring all of Israel for the past year, but Bar-Or said he was not at liberty to say if the Delta variant had been identified in other cities as of late.

He said the lab has recommended stepping-up monitoring given the situation in Ashkelon.

This is not the first time the Health Ministry discovered infection through wastewater. In March, the Health Ministry reported an Israeli coronavirus mutation that was discovered at the end of the previous year through the sewage sequencing project, first in Rahat and then in Netanya and Haifa.

In recent days, the number of serious patients has also registered a slight increase, from its lowest since last summer, 21 on Saturday, to 27 on Thursday. In January, however, serious cases were over 1,200.

“We almost do not see any serious morbidity,” the Health Ministry’s Director-General Chezy Levy said to Channel 12. “If we do, we will consider additional restrictions.”

In the meantime, the vaccination campaign is slowly regaining speed. On Wednesday, over 10,000 shots were administered for the first time in two months. Of those, almost 7,000 were first doses given to children aged 12-15, marking another significant increase compared to the previous day, when about 4,100 teens were inoculated, and to Monday, when the number stood at 2,600.

The government has indicated that inoculation of the age group 12-15 is one of the priorities to contain the new outbreak.

As announced by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett earlier in the week, Ash said that currently all vaccines Israel possesses are due to expire at the end of July. While Israel is working to obtain new doses to make sure it has vaccines also in August, this has not been confirmed.

The government is working on several fronts to contain the new surge in cases.

The obligation to wear masks has already been restored at the airport and in medical facilities, and the enforcement of regulations, including quarantine requirements for people returning from abroad has been stepped up. Ash said that additional technological tools, including electronic bracelets are being considered for those who are required to enter quarantine and recommendations will be made to the government.

Furthermore, Bennett announced on Wednesday that the entry of vaccinated foreign nationals, which was supposed to be allowed from July 1, was postponed to August 1.

Some 11 of the new cases identified on Wednesday arrived from abroad, seven of whom were fully vaccinated. Overall, about half of the identified virus carriers in the past month had been inoculated. However, according to Ash this should not come as a surprise.

“There are a high number of vaccinated people in Israel, so it is normal that we see vaccinated people who get infected. It does not say anything about the efficacy of the vaccine,” he said. “We know that the vaccine is not 100% effective but some percentage points less than that.”

Israeli health officials and experts are checking the data about the spread of the Delta variant in the country, but Ash noted that the information published about what is happening in the UK shows the Pfizer vaccine is very effective against it.

“The data we have today, accumulated from research we are conducting at the lab, and including data from those places where the Indian variant, Delta, has replaced the British variant as the common variant, point to our vaccine being very effective, around 90%, in preventing the coronavirus disease, COVID-19,” Alon Rappaport, Pfizer’s medical director in Israel, told local broadcaster Army Radio earlier in the day.

According to KAN, the new coronavirus cabinet will convene for its first meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday night.