The World Health Organization’s heat map puts Israel in the top five in the wider European region. That could change the transmission dynamics and expose all age groups to infection because of kids coming home with COVID-19, Balicer said. Significantly, the booster shot is also available for anyone over 12 who was vaccinated at least five months ago. That rises to at least 64% for people in age brackets over 60. 6, at least 2.6 million people in Israel-around 28% of the population-have now had the booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the Israeli Health Ministry. The data coming from Israel in the coming weeks will allow the world to assess the efficacy of the booster shot program, he said.Īs of Sept. “Waning immunity is a real challenge that every country needs to prepare a contingency plan to tackle,” said Balicer, who is also chief innovation officer for Israeli health maintenance organization Clalit. The highest rate of new cases in recent weeks is among children under the age of 12, according to Ran Balicer, chair of the expert advisory panel to the government. The importance of that drive is heightened by the return of millions of children to schools last week, and the Jewish New Year this week.Įpidemiologists say cases among the over 30s are already declining thanks to the boosters and restrictions on bars and restaurants to the fully vaccinated. That said, unvaccinated people account for more than 10 times as many serious cases as those who have received two doses, showing that even with immunity waning, shots are providing protection.įor public health officials and politicians, the latest chapter of the pandemic is to concentrate on ensuring older people more at risk continue to be protected while cases are rising among children. There were also so-called breakthrough infections in those who have been vaccinated, and the drop in efficacy of vaccines. Infections jumped because of the prevalence of cases among the unvaccinated, especially children. The number of people falling seriously sick and being hospitalized, though, has risen less than it did during the last coronavirus wave, peaking at 751 in late August, compared with 1,183 in mid-January. About 61% of Israelis have been given two doses, lower than in European laggards earlier in the year such as France and Spain.įollowing the spread of the delta variant over the summer, Israel has seen cases climb, reaching an all-time high of 11,316 daily cases on Sept. The program plateaued amid hesitancy from some in the Orthodox Jewish and Arab communities. Since April, Israel has fallen from first to 33rd in Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker of populations considered fully vaccinated. “If you are able to maintain life without lockdown, and to avoid very high numbers of hospitalizations and death, then this is what life with Covid looks like,” said Eyal Leshem, a professor specializing in infectious diseases at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Ha-Shomer. Around 100,000 Israelis are getting inoculated every day, the vast majority of them with a third shot. More recently, it has led the way when it comes to vaccinating children and rolling out a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after research suggested reduced efficacy over time. It’s no longer just about whether people get coronavirus, but also how badly they get it and ensuring that vaccines are still working as the highly infectious delta variant threatens to undermine immunity. Yet Israel now shows how the calculus is changing in places where progress was fastest. The nation of 9 million became the test case for reopening society and the economy in April when much of Europe and the U.S. Its world-beating inoculation rate, meanwhile, has tumbled down the league table. 4, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The country that was once predicted to be the first to vaccinate its entire population had the highest per-capita caseload of anywhere in the week through Sept. If (slot) slot.addService(googletag.Israel, once a front-runner in the global race to move on from COVID-19, is now one of the world’s biggest pandemic hot spots. (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) Messiah News and latest stories | The Jerusalem Post
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