Apparently a coronavirus pandemic is a historical event that takes place, once every 100 years. No healthcare system in the world, developed and advanced as it may be, can treat tens of thousands (or more) severely ill people requiring respirators, as experts expect will be necessary during this pandemic.
It's also true that, up to this point, the Israeli Health Ministry and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have responded well, with determination and dedication, and have risen to the occasion much better than many other countries across the globe.
And yet the state comptroller's report, which was written prior to the coronavirus outbreak, unequivocally and categorically shows that the Health Ministry and other government ministries drastically failed in recent years even prior to the outbreak, to prepare for and handle a pandemic and that considerably better preparations, and the actual and full implementation of government decisions and the Comptroller's recommendations from previous inquiries into the subject, could have prepared Israel far better for the coronavirus pandemic, which is menacing the world and Israel's health, society, and economy.
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The state comptroller's warnings were as if he predicted the coronavirus outbreak in advance when he wrote that "terminating pandemics is a mission the entire world is dealing with, in the common goal of preventing medical, economic and developmental damage to all of mankind. In Israel, responsibility for this falls first and foremost on the Health Ministry, together with the various national health funds, the ministries of Agriculture and Environmental Protection, local municipalities and the Defense Ministry," but despite this "the Health Ministry hasn't prepared an organized action-plan for any one of the diseases it determined must be prepared for, including the measles."
The comptroller also revealed that the Health Ministry's preparations for the measles outbreak (in 2018-19) was exceedingly partial and failure because critical issues – such as identification and treatment of a population group that refuses to vaccinate or has poor access to vaccines – weren't addressed appropriately.
The numerous failures noted by the comptroller all pertain to pandemics far smaller in scope and less lethal than the coronavirus, and yet there's no question that these failures and shortcomings also mean that the preparations for the unprecedented coronavirus could have and should have been much better, starting with properly stockpiling supplies and equipment in hospitals, and enlisting dozens of badly needed public health nurses in a timely fashion (who interview infected people for the purpose of tracing the virus' origins). Also required were medical, educational and legal public relations campaigns aimed at anti-vaxxers, including the handful of doctors who in recent years incited parents not to vaccinate their children, which the Health Ministry didn't bother to address for years.
The steps taken by the state and Health Ministry to stop the spread of the coronavirus include unprecedented tools unseen in Israel or the world for decades and perhaps centuries. And yet, the tools that were intended to safeguard the public's health are part of the measures and tools that always exist and need to always be accessible to the Health Ministry. Had the Health Ministry performed its legal and public duties and prepared in the best manner possible for pandemics that always pose a public threat, there's no doubt that the country's readiness for the coronavirus would have been far better and more correct, and there would be a better chance of saving more lives.
