Israel confirmed over 500 new cases of the coronavirus for the third day in a row on Tuesday, according to the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate's national coronavirus information center.
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Among the 74,421 coronavirus tests carried out Tuesday, 519 were found to be positive for an infection rate of 0.7%. Of the 3,568 Israelis currently infected with COVID, 46 are in serious condition and 16 are on ventilators.
Although 834,583 Israelis have recovered from the virus since the outbreak of the pandemic, 6,429 have died.
After over two weeks in which Israel saw no new deaths from the coronavirus, Haifa's Rambam Health Care Campus reported an 86-year-old patient who had been fully inoculated against the virus had died. The man had been hospitalized in serious condition last week. His wife, a woman in her 90s, remains hospitalized in moderate to serious condition with the virus.
There are currently 78 Israelis hospitalized with the virus in Israel. Of those hospitalized, 51% are unvaccinated, 45% are innoculated, and 4% were in the process of being vaccinated.
At a press conference Wednesday, coronavirus chief Nachman Ash said: "I hope we don't reach the point of another lockdown. That's far off. It depends on the number of seriously ill patients – when it presents a threat to the health system. When we reach high enough numbers that we want to stop them. I can't offer a specific number, but we're talking about hundreds of seriously ill patients."
"In light of the expected morbidity wave as a result of the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus," national coronavirus center officials wrote that "accelerating vaccination is the principal solution to diminishing risk of developing serious illness and long-term symptoms among those infected. The more people in the population are vaccinated, the fewer people will be infected until we reach a new balance with this virus variant. It is recommended that high-risk populations, as well as others, including teens aged 12 to 15, get vaccinated immediately, to limit the risk of long COVID symptoms."
With the virus spreading across the country, the number of Israelis in quarantine is at a three-month high of 54,450. Outbreaks have been recorded at summer programs at schools across the country.
According to the government's traffic-light program for ranking local authorities according to coronavirus infection rates, two Israeli cities are "red," six are "orange," and 27 are "yellow."
The global death toll from COVID-19 eclipsed 4 million Wednesday as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and the highly contagious delta variant originally discovered in India.
The tally of lives lost around the world over the past year and a half, as compiled from official sources by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the number of people killed in battle in all of the world's wars since 1982, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Even then, the death toll is widely believed to be an undercount because of overlooked cases or deliberate concealment.
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