COVID: Bennett vows decision on 3rd shot is near as cases top 2,000

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett promised that the Israeli authorities are working at full speed on whether to start giving elderly people a third coronavirus vaccine as the country registered over 2,100 new cases on Tuesday, the highest number since March.

“We have been dealing with it, believe me, for a month now,” Bennett said while visiting the assisted living Migdal Nofim in Jerusalem, according to Hebrew site Ynet. “There are things that need to be allowed to ripen. We are very close. The less we talk about it, the higher the chance it will happen.”

Nursing home and assisted living facilities paid a heavy price during the pandemic. The first victim of COVID in Israel, 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Aryeh Even was living at Migdal Nofim. The prime minister visited the facility with Social Equality Minister Meirav Cohen.

Over half of the current cases and two thirds of patients in serious conditions were fully vaccinated.

While the data helps explain while the rise in serious morbidity has been limited compared to the general morbidity – at the beginning of June there were some 20 serious patients with less than 200 active cases in the country, now there are 138 of them with over 13,000 active cases – health officials and experts have been worrying that the protection granted to the most vulnerable sectors of the population who were vaccinated first has been waning.

The vast majority of vaccinated people in serious conditions are elderly.

While visiting the corona ward at the Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva on Monday morning, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said that Israel is getting ready to give them a third shot, if the decision is made.

According to reports in Israeli media, most of the experts advising the Health Ministry support the move in principle, even though the debate has been very heated, since a third shot has not obtained the authorization of the US FDA or any other major health authorities.

Some 2, 112 cases were registers on Monday, which also marked the four-month record of tests processed within 24 hours with some 95,000 tests. The positive rate stood at 2.3%, also marking an increase from previous days. On the previous day, some 1,400 cases were registered, but the number of tests was significantly lower (around 72,000).

In addition, the number of serious patients climbed to 138, compared to 124 on the previous day and 97 the day before. The figure has more than doubled in a week.

The reproduction rate, or R – which measures the number of people each virus carrier infects on average – continued to be over 1, showing that the outbreak is still expanding (an R lower than 1 would show that the disease is receding). On Tuesday it stood at 1.33.

Out of the people who tested positive over the last 24 hours, some 203 arrived in Israel via Ben-Gurion airport during the last 10 days.

“We see a very large rate of infection because of the Delta variant,” Horowitz also said. “We warned about this and took measures and part of them is represented by preparing hospitals in Israel for the treatment of critically ill patients who are hospitalized as a consequence of the infection with the coronavirus.”