Israel is trying to slow the wave without resorting to a new lockdown, which Prime Minister Naftali Bennett says would take an economic toll and "destroy the future of the country." The country is placing caps on gatherings, increasing hospital staff and pleading for unvaccinated people to get immunized. Vaccinations are key, but they are not enough. "That will lead to mass infection, which is exactly what we are seeing now," said Segal. Unvaccinated people helped fuel the rapid spread of the virus while the country remained open for business in recent months with few serious restrictions. Health officials say that currently 600 seriously ill patients are hospitalized, and they warn they cannot handle more than 1,000 serious infections at the same time. Deaths increased from five in June to at least 248 so far this month. Israel's daily average number of infections has nearly doubled in the past two weeks and has increased around tenfold since mid-July, approaching the numbers during Israel's peak in the winter. The seriously ill patients who are unvaccinated are mostly young, healthy people whose condition deteriorated quickly.
Most of them are over 60 years old and have comorbidities. The bad news, doctors say, is that half of Israel's seriously ill patients who are currently hospitalized were fully vaccinated at least five months ago. The good news is that among Israel's serious infections on Thursday of this week, according to Health Ministry data, the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) was nine times more than the rate among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) was a little more than double the rate among vaccinated people in that age bracket. If you get infected, being vaccinated helps. "The most influential event was so many people who went abroad in the summer - vacations - and brought the delta variant very, very quickly to Israel," said Siegal Sadetzki, a former public health director in Israel's Health Ministry. Delta accounts for nearly all infections in Israel today. It was a perfect storm: The vaccine's waning protection came around the same time the more infectious delta variant arrived in Israel this summer. The delta variant broke through the vaccine's waning protection. Health officials, and then Pfizer, said their data showed a dip in the vaccine's protection around six months after receiving the second shot. By June, all restrictions, including indoor masking, were abolished.īut Israel paid a price for the early rollout. Infections waned, venues reopened to the vaccinated and the prime minister told Israelis to go out and have fun. Israel had fully vaccinated slightly over half its population by March 25. Immunity from the vaccine dips over time. And we keep in mind that we're all neighbors in this global village. We tell stories of life in our changing world, focusing on low- and middle-income countries. Goats and Soda is NPR's global health and development blog.
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