The coronavirus infection wave continued to decrease in the past 24 hours, according to the latest Health Ministry data. On Monday, 123,001 Israelis were screened for the disease, of whom 23,555 tested positive. The morbidity rate stands at 19.15%.
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There are 178,118 active cases in the country with 2,155 patients hospitalized. Of those, 974 are in serious condition – 338 are critically ill, 279 are on ventilators and 27 are connected to ECMO machines. Currently, 35,854 Israelis are in quarantine.
Thus far, 699,505 Israelis have been vaccinated with four doses, 4,456,018 with three, 6,113,744 with two, and 6,696,058 have received one dose.
Israel has reported 3,460,914 cases, including 9,624 deaths, since the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020.
However, while the Omicron-fueled morbidity wave seems to be in retreat in Israel, a new wave of infections from the strain is moving towards the east of Europe, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, urging authorities to improve vaccination and other measures.
Over the past two weeks, cases of COVID-19 have more than doubled in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine, WHO's Europe regional director Hans Kluge said in a statement.
The comments come at a time when several European countries including the Czech Republic and Poland have hinted at easing of COVID-19 restrictions next month if daily infection numbers kept falling.
The WHO, however, stressed the continued need for measures such as rapid testing and masking, saying over 165 million COVID-19 cases have been recorded so far across the WHO European region, with 25,000 deaths in the past week.
"Faced with the Omicron tidal wave, and with Delta still circulating widely in the east, this worrying situation is not the moment to lift measures that we know work in reducing the spread of COVID-19," Kluge said.
He also called on governments to examine local reasons for low vaccination rates. Less than 40% of those aged over 60 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan have completed their COVID-19 vaccine series, he said.
In related news, new data shows that the immune response to COVID-19 helps protect against reinfection, but that protection is weaker against Omicron than it was against earlier variants of the coronavirus.
A previous SARS-CoV-2 infection protects against Omicron reinfection only 56% of the time, researchers found in a review of national data in Qatar. Having had COVID was 90.2% effective against reinfection with the Alpha variant, 85.7% effective against a Beta variant reinfection, and 92% effective against Delta reinfection, researchers reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
As was the case with reinfection due to earlier variants, however, "the protection of previous infection against hospitalization or death caused by reinfection [with Omicron] appeared to be robust," they said. In cases of reinfection with Omicron, for example, the immune response to previous infection was 87.8% effective at preventing the second infection from progressing to severe or critical illness or death.
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