The Health Ministry said Sunday that the decrease in the number of new coronavirus cases diagnosed daily has held steady over the weekend, expressing cautious optimism that Israel may soon be able to ease lockdown measures.
According to the ministry, only 7.3% of the 13,387 screening tests performed on Saturday came back positive. This is the lowest positivity rate of virus testing Israel has seen in a month.
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Israel has so far recorded 290,003 corona cases, including 1,941 deaths. No COVID-19 patients has died over the past 24 hours, the data shows.
There are currently 214 criritcal patients who are on ventilarots. Some 225,926 Israelis have so far recovered from the disease.
Meanwhile, a doctor and two nurses at the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv may have been infected with the coronavirus by the aerosol coming out of a ventilator being used on a patient, the hospital said.
Infections among medical teams in coronavirus units, where they are equipped with maximal personal protective gear, are very rare.
"We have almost no infections within coronavirus units, so this is a very uncommon occurrence," said Dr. Yael Paran, an infectious diseases specialist and director of Sourasky's Traveler's Clinic. "This is incident is very worrison. Infection in the coronavirus ward is something we are very afraid of," she said, stressing that additional precausiton had been set in place to avoid future infections.
In related news, a 30-second coronavirus detection test being developed by India and Israel should be ready in "a matter of days," Israeli Ambassador to India Ron Malka said.
According to reports in locl media, Malka said he believes the testing kit will enable airlines to resume operations, and see global travel recover from the blow the pandemic has dealt it.
He noted that since the technology requires a person to simply blow into a tube and the results become available in less than a minute, mass testing should be very cheap to carry out.
"It will be good news for the entire world," he said, adding that India would likely serve as the manufacturing headquarters for this rapid-test kit.
News of the test came on the heels of a statment by the World Health Organization, which on Friday announced a new daily record in coronavirus cases worldwide, exceeding 350,000 reported infections.
The new daily high of 350,766 cases surpasses a record set earlier this week by nearly 12,000. That tally includes more than 109,000 cases from Europe alone, according to the report.
In a press briefing on Friday, WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan acknowledged that even as COVID-19 continues to surge across the world, "there are no new answers."
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