Is the coronavirus Delta wave in Israel really abating?
| Published date | 03 October 2021 |
| Author | ROSSELLA TERCATIN |
| Publication title | Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel) |
The past few days have shown increasingly encouraging data, prompting health officials to express optimism just days after they had sounded the alarm about a new increase in serious patients and the overload on Israeli hospitals.
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The upcoming week or two will be crucial in understanding where the country is really headed, by looking at the change in data as the number of daily tests performed becomes more consistent. Even more so, officials will be able to see how the full reopening of schools is affecting trends, as several experts said.
"Several elements are very encouraging," said Prof. Cyrille Cohen, head of the immunotherapy laboratory at Bar-Ilan University. "The positivity rate has been steadily decreasing for a few weeks – it stood at 6%-7% and now is down to around 2.7%," referring to the percentage of corona tests returning a positive result, which, as he noted, "is less influenced by the number of tests, contrary to what happens with the daily cases themselves."
The number of tests performed every day in the second half of August and the very beginning of September was consistently around 150,000. After the holiday period began, it fluctuated between 55,000 and 185,000, with as little as 2,400 to more than 10,000 people infected.
On Saturday, however, only 1,709 new cases were identified according to the Sunday report by the Health Ministry, marking the lowest number since the end of July.
"The figure of patients in serious conditions, which is even more objective, is also declining," said Cohen. "We were at over 700 and now we are at 580. The daily number of people developing serious symptoms is going down as well."
"The situation is complex but we can see that the trend is undoubtedly improving," said Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, director of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's School of Public Health, an epidemiologist and a member of the expert committee advising the ministry on the crisis.
Davidovitch also emphasized that the R, or reproduction rate, has been dropping, currently standing at 0.74.
Davidovitch explained that several other elements besides the number of daily cases are taken into account to calculate it, therefore it can be considered a reliable sign that morbidity is declining.
"At the...
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