Have you heard of the government's public education campaign that encourages Israelis who have not yet been vaccinated to do so? How about the one that calls on doubly-vaccinated Israelis to get their booster shots? Its mass immunization efforts across Israeli schools? Workplace restrictions on unvaccinated individuals, including healthcare and education workers? Special programs to increase the number of hospital staff and doctors and nurses' availability to treat coronavirus patients? Most likely you have not.
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It is because the government has not implemented these steps, although they are crucial to saving lives and curbing the spread of the coronavirus in the country, given that the highly-contagious Omicron variant has just been detected in Israel for the first time.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz have boasted in recent weeks that they managed to take Israel out of the Delta wave without a single day in lockdown or strict restrictions on public life, as it happened in previous morbidity waves.
But contrary to their claims, the fourth wave has not come to an end at all: the Health Ministry reports hundreds of new cases daily as well as a consistent increase in the reproduction rate in the past week.
Bennett and Horowitz are quick to forget the 1,700 Israelis who died of COVID in the Delta wave, having joined the thousands who lost their lives since the outbreak of the pandemic last year.
Ever since the government declared the "end of Delta," it has made a series of irresponsible, dangerous, and hasty decisions, the latest of which was easing the test result requirements for Israelis traveling back from abroad.
On Friday, both Bennett and Horowitz came to their senses and decided to bar tourists from entering Israel for two weeks. However, despite the ban being crucial to curbing Omicron, some ministers will surely try to pressure the Coronavirus Cabinet into allowing travel again, as they have successfully done in recent weeks.
The most important task on the government's agenda should be the immunization of children ages of 5-11. This will help reach herd immunity and prevent hundreds of kids from getting infected with COVID, developing serious illness, and Heaven forbid, dying.
According to data from the Israel Pediatric Association , of the half a million children who were hospitalized with COVID since the outbreak of the pandemic, 201 developed serious illnesses. Of those, 11 died.
Data from Britain shows that 4.6% of children who are infected with the virus can develop severe symptoms after recovering. These range from difficulty breathing, insomnia, muscle and joint pain, to diabetes and damage to the nerve system.
The current children's immunization rate is insufficient. If the government seeks to vaccinate more than a million Israeli kids, it must invest much greater efforts and arrange mass vaccinations at schools, even despite opposition from Education Ministry officials.
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