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The total number of severe COVID-19 cases in Israel topped 200 for the first time since mid-April on Saturday, after a new record of daily cases during the current coronavirus outbreak was recorded the day before .
According to figures from the Ministry of Health on Saturday night, there were 201 serious cases, 22 more than at midnight. Of these, 37 people were listed as being in critical condition, including 31 on ventilators.
The last time there were more than 200 serious patients in Israel was on April 14.
The death toll rose to 6,473, with three more deaths that day.
The ministry reported that 2,435 cases were confirmed on Friday, with 2.49% of the more than 103,633 tests performed coming back positive.
In addition to 1,589 other infections since midnight, there have been 873,827 confirmed cases of COVID in the country since the start of the pandemic.
Earlier, a health expert advising the government on its response to the pandemic tweeted that 67% more cases were recorded last week compared to the previous week.
Eran Segal noted that the number of tests carried out over the past week also increased by 25%, approaching the record levels set during the COVID-19 wave over the winter, when many more infections , serious cases and deaths were recorded per day. The current positive test rate has also been lower than it was during this outbreak.
“It’s good because more confirmed [cases] are localized, but this also explains part of this increase [in infections]”said Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
He also said the baseline reproduction number – the number of new cases resulting from each coronavirus infection – was also likely closer to 1.2%, lower than the Health Ministry’s most recently reported figure of 1. , 34%, which would indicate that the spread of the virus was slowing down.
“A 15% drop in contacts can result in an outage,” Segal said.
“The way to get there: a third dose and vaccination of young people,” he added.
Israel: cases vs deaths, showing marked reduction in death rate in vaccine age, as in other countries
Graph by @feldman_gil pic.twitter.com/7DriGnI45G
– Eran Segal (@segal_eran) July 31, 2021
Segal’s comments came a day after Israel began administering the third vaccines to people over the age of 60, making Israel the first country in the world to do so.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told health officials that the government’s goal is to vaccinate 1.5 million Israelis over the age of 60 in the next eight days.
“It’s not a long operation, it will be fast and furious,” Meuhedet HMO chief executive Sigal Rosenberg told the Ynet news site on Friday, explaining that another goal of the vaccination campaign is to relieve the pressure on hospitals in the coming weeks. and prevent them from being invaded by elderly patients with coronavirus.
Israel’s decision to start administering third doses comes amid a struggle to contain a recent wave of coronavirus infections that has seen the number of cases skyrocket from a few dozen a day a day ago. months at an average daily load of over 2,000 this week.
An Israeli is seen after receiving a third Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in the Israeli town of Ramat HaSharon on July 30, 2021. (AP / Sebastian Scheiner)
Department of Health Director General Nachman Ash said on Friday that no additional COVID restrictions were planned to be implemented in the immediate future, telling Channel 12 that “the vaccine is our solution to get out of pandemic, so it is important that everyone who can go to get vaccinated.
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