The special ministerial forum to combat the COVID-19 pandemic gave the green light on Thursday for the gradual lifting of Israel's nationwide lockdown, with preschools and some businesses resuming operations as early as Sunday.
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Israelis will also no longer be required to stay within 1 km (0.6 miles) from their homes, and restaurants will be allowed to resume curbside pickup. Businesses that do not cater to the public in-person will also be allowed to resume operation, while nature reserves will be open to the general public.
At the start of the ministerial meeting Thursday Netanyahu said that the easing was a direct consequence of the ongoing lockdown, which has already entered its third week.
"As of now, the lockdown has been a major success. We are seeing a decline in all data, a clear and consistent decline," Netanyahu said at the meeting, according to his Twitter account. "We want to converge on the indicators which the Health Ministry and the experts have suggested to us so that we can begin to gradually ease the current conditions of the lockdown. We need to do this so that we will not have an additional lockdown in two or three weeks," he tweeted. "Therefore, the exit needs to be gradual, responsible, careful and controlled. However, there is no doubt that as of now there is a success here which they are already beginning to look at in many countries, mainly in Europe, where morbidity in several countries already passed us."
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Fewer than 2,000 new carriers were diagnosed on Wednesday, the Health Ministry said Thursday. This is consistent with the general downward trajectory of new cases. A low positivity rate of 5.3% (out of the roughly 40,000 tests carried out over the past 24 hours) and the 0.63 reproduction rate were also encouraging indicators, officials noted ahead of the meeting (having a rate that is below 1 is considered essential to contain the pandemic).
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