COVID-19: Israel’s draconian travel restrictions keeps us from adapting

I’ve tried to be patient the last few weeks. I have observed Prime Minister Naftali Bennett exhorting citizens not to travel. I’ve seen our previous prime minister vacationing in California.

Every one of the incoming groups that were planning to come to Israel in August or for the High Holy Days has canceled.

I have advised potential groups not to book tickets or hotels for October, as nobody in our government has any firm policy on when tourists will be allowed back in.

El Al just furloughed another 1,000 workers, who are marching on the Knesset demanding an end to the ban on tourists and the required quarantine. The head of the Israeli travel agent association is warning of the collapse of the industry and demanding government assistant.

In a galaxy far, far away, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Gilad Erdan, waxes poetic that he believes that, sooner or later, Israelis will be permitted to fly to the US utilizing the Visa Waiver program that 39 other countries can take advantage of. What poppycock.

When will our government, our political leaders, map out a policy allowing us to live with COVID-19? From almost every country in the world that Israelis can fly to, they return to a 14-day quarantine. Almost reluctantly, the Health Ministry allows, with a negative COVID-19 test, the option to get freed on day seven.

Has anyone pointed out the absurdity of these draconian regulations? To get on a plane and fly to Israel, one must have a negative PCR test within 72 hours of departing the visiting country. To exit Ben-Gurion Airport, everyone must have another COVID-19 test and stay in quarantine until the results are given. That’s not good enough for our health professionals; now you must stay in quarantine an additional 14 days. This inane policy of exclusion is a knee-jerk, reactive instinct.

Do they know something about the Delta variant that the rest of the world does not? Is the Delta variant so insidious that it will show up only seven days after flying?

Let’s look at the United Kingdom, a country whose citizens are still not allowed into the United States, unlike Israelis. To fly into Great Britain, you need a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of your departing flight. Moreover, you need to book and pay for a day-two COVID-19 test, to be taken after arrival in England. Most importantly, you do not have to quarantine unless the test is positive.

Okay, so many readers don’t trust the British; never forgave them for how they treated us pre-1948, or don’t like a mop-haired politician.

What about Canada, then? Surely it has regulations, as Israel has, forcing all tourists or returning citizens to go into quarantine. Sorry, no such directives exist. Nor do they in the United States and 50 other countries that let tourists in. Some require only a vaccination certificate; the others demand a negative COVID-19 test to fly into them.

AS RECENTLY as the middle of July, Israel was reveling in a return to normal life. In fact, the vaccination drives had driven down deaths and infections from COVID-19, and the wearing of face masks became optional. Social distancing rules were removed, and one could contemplate coping and living with the virus, as few believed it would be eradicated.

Then came the more infectious Delta variant, and around the world, as well as in Israel, there was a surge in cases.

How to react? Do we throw our hands in the air, screaming “The sky is falling, the sky is falling”? Did no one in our Health Ministry expect there would be new variants? Does anyone understand that the Delta variant may not be the last variant? Learn a new word soon to enter our lexicon: Lambda variant.

Shorn of ideas, Bennett and his cronies start flying trial balloons. Maybe we should shut the airport down. Maybe we should encourage a booster shot and inoculate over one million citizens in only two weeks. Maybe we should give more money to the hospitals, realizing that there would be a need for COVID-19 wards, and that the entire health system is woefully underbudgeted. Or do we simply threaten all malcontents that if they don’t buckle up, we will shut down the entire country?

This is what our best and brightest have come up with? No clear policy but a daily verbiage of reactive comments.

It’s bad enough the prime minister says don’t travel abroad; now he’s initiated a 14-day quarantine for anyone brave enough to travel abroad. Why? There is simply no scientific evidence that this path will lower our infection rates.

The travel industry has been shaken to its core the last 17 months. Dozens of airlines are just now starting to renew flying to and from Israel. Every county has set its bylaws on what is required to enter.

Israel, though, has set the bar so high it is as though we are building a Tower of Babel. If our purpose is to be a light among the nations or reach the heavens, history will show us we are destined to fail.

WE MUST learn to live with COVID-19. No education minister is fighting with the health minister in other countries as to whether testing can done on the hallowed grounds of a schoolyard; it is being done.

Want to teach in a school or work at United Airlines or write software for IBM? Then you had better be vaccinated or agree to be tested every other day.

When anti-vaxxers first espoused their objections to vaccines, stating it was a Chinese conspiracy or that the global pharmaceutical companies created it to make money, it was hard to take them seriously.

Today the arguments against vaccinations are more sophisticated, along the lines of nobody knows the effect, after 10 years, of being inoculated.

Quite true, and while I would never force anyone to do something against their beliefs, those steadfast deniers had better be prepared to be tested every other day, if they want to enter the workforce or partake in leisure activities.

We need leaders, not followers; planners, not reactionaries. We didn’t have it in the last government, nor do we have it in the present one. I don’t need politicians to set policy; for that we need health professionals. I need politicians to set a constructive tone, not to threaten us with punishment or quarantine.

When 23 religious Israelis were arrested at Ben-Gurion Airport trying to board a United Airlines plane to Newark with fake COVID-19 test results, why didn’t a single rabbi condemn them? Why wasn’t there a single minister haranguing them? Why didn’t the papers print their names and pictures to further shame them?

Like you, I’m glad our police arrested them; my concern is how many more were able to fly without being caught.

Surprise, there are dishonest Israelis in our country; there are some who care so little about the welfare of their fellow man that they will pay a small sum to create a fake COVID-19 test. United won’t ban them from flying on the airline in the future; it would never alienate potential clients.

What our present government is doing is falling for the exclusion instinct. Throughout history, the natural human response to disease has been to try to shut ourselves off from it. Australia and New Zealand throughout the pandemic have chosen this path. Those countries have closed their borders to try to keep the variants of the virus out. This exclusion instinct permeates every decision the government has taken. It is not sustainable for Israel.

The exclusion instinct makes an immense amount of sense if there’s a sick, infectious person near you. Keeping them farther away is a wise move, generally – it’s what lies behind social distancing, for example.

But applying it to borders in the 21st century is the wrong way to do it. The world became a global disease pool, if you will, after Columbus “discovered” America. It doesn’t take very many people moving around to move infections around.

We didn’t manage travel bans well at the start of COVID-19 for several reasons. The bans were put in too late. A lot of people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic, and we didn’t fully understand the danger of the disease until long after it had already spread across most of the world.

Also, when we put the travel bans in place, the immediate result was that a whole load of people traveled to get home because the bans weren’t absolute. Remember, like the gold rush, the stampede to travel to the United Arab Emirates? That gave people time to respond, time to hop on a plane and time to arrive at incredibly crowded airports and hang around for hours next to a lot of other people. Exactly the kind of thing you don’t want to happen in a pandemic, we helped to make happen.

The much more effective way to reduce new mutations and the threat of spread is to control this disease where it is out of control. There aren’t new variants emerging in New Zealand or in Taiwan, because they’ve got the disease under control. It’s in the places where it is raging and hundreds of thousands have it that the problem emerges. So, the best response is to use local methods – use social distancing, use masks to reduce local spread. That’s the way we get this disease under control, not travel bans.

Push for vaccinations; encourage private and public employers to make it a demand for continued employment. Test in the schools often. Fight it everywhere and do not capitulate. But live with it we must, and live with it we shall. We are not an island. We cannot shut ourselves off.

COVID-19 will probably be endemic but a rather minor killer. With the vaccines, only 5% of people still get the virus. If you look at their impact on death rates and serious cases, the effectiveness of the vaccines is above 95%. Put that together with the fact that we hope nearly everyone worldwide will eventually be vaccinated.

Remember, at the start of all of this, when people were saying, “Oh, it’s no worse than the flu”? That will become true only if we decide to live with COVID-19 and act accordingly.

For questions and comments email him at mark.feldman@ziontours.co.il