JERUSALEM: Four weeks ago, Israel was celebrating a return to normal life in its battle with COVID-19.
After a rapid vaccination drive that had driven down coronavirus infections and deaths, Israelis had stopped wearing face masks and abandoned all social-distancing rules.
Then came the more infectious Delta variant, and a surge in cases that has forced Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to reimpose some COVID-19 restrictions and rethink strategy.
Under what he calls a policy of “soft suppression,” the government wants Israelis to learn to live with the virus — involving the fewest possible restrictions and avoiding a fourth national lockdown that could do further harm to the economy.
As most Israelis in risk groups have now been vaccinated against COVID-19, Bennett is counting on fewer people than before falling seriously ill when infections rise.
“Implementing the strategy will entail taking certain risks but in the overall consideration, including economic factors, this is the necessary balance,” Bennett said last week.
The main indicator guiding the move is the number of severe COVID-19 cases in hospital, currently around 45. Implementation will entail monitoring infections, encouraging vaccinations, rapid testing and information campaigns about face masks.
The strategy has drawn comparisons with the British government’s plans to reopen England’s economy from lockdown, though Israel is in the process of reinstating some curbs while London is lifting restrictions.
The curbs that have been reinstated include the mandatory wearing of face masks indoors and quarantine for all people arriving in Israel.
Bennett’s strategy, like that of the British government, has been questioned by some scientists.
Israel’s Health Ministry advocates more of a push for stemming infections, Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of public health at Israel’s Health Ministry, told Kan Radio on Sunday.
“It’s possible that there won’t be a big rise in the severely ill but the price of making such a mistake is what’s worrying us,” she said.
But many other scientists are supportive.
“I am very much in favor of Israel’s approach,” said Nadav Davidovitch, director of the school of public health at Israel’s Ben Gurion University, describing it as a “golden path” between Britain’s easing of restrictions and countries such as Australia that take a tougher line.
The virus ‘won’t stop’
Israel’s last lockdown was enforced in December, about a week after the start of what has been one of the world’s fastest vaccination programs.
New daily COVID-19 infections are running at about 450. The Delta variant, first identified in India, now makes up about 90 percent of cases.
“We estimate that we won’t reach high waves of severe cases like in previous waves,” the health ministry’s director-general, Nachman Ash, said last week. “But if we see that the number and increase rate of severe cases are endangering the (health) system, then we will have to take further steps.”
Around 60 percent of Israel’s 9.3 million population have received at least one shot of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine. On Sunday, the government began offering a third shot to people with a compromised immune system.
Ran Balicer, chair of the government’s expert panel on COVID-19, said Israel had on average had about five severe cases of the virus and one death per day in the last week, after two weeks of zero deaths related to COVID-19.
Noting the impact of the Delta variant, he said the panel was advising caution over the removal of restrictions.
“We do not have enough data from our local outbreak to be able to predict with accuracy what would happen if we let go,” Balicer said.
Some studies have shown that though high, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine’s effectiveness against the Delta variant is lower than against other coronavirus strains. Drawing criticism from some scientists, Pfizer and BioNTech SE have said they will ask US and European regulators to authorize booster shots to head off increased risk of infection six months after inoculation.
Israel is in no rush to approve public booster shots, saying there is no unequivocal data yet showing they are necessary. It is offering approval only to people with weak immune systems on a case-by-case basis.
Authorities are also considering allowing children under 12 to take the vaccine on a case-by-case basis if they suffer from health conditions that put them at high risk of serious complications if they were to catch the virus.
Only “a few hundred” of the 5.5 million people who have been vaccinated in Israel have later been infected with COVID-19, Ash said.
Before the Delta variant arrived, Israel had estimated 75 percent of the population would need to be vaccinated to reach “herd immunity” — the level at which enough of a population are immunized to be able to effectively stop a disease spreading. The estimated threshold is now 80 percent.
Such data ensure doctors remain concerned.
.”..the virus won’t stop. It is evolving, it’s its nature. But our nature is to survive,” said Dr. Gadi Segal, head of the coronavirus ward at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv.
Living with COVID-19: Israel changes strategy as Delta variant hits
https://arab.news/mb6xn
Living with COVID-19: Israel changes strategy as Delta variant hits
- Under what he calls a policy of “soft suppression,” the government wants Israelis to learn to live with the virus
- Israel’s last lockdown was enforced in December, about a week after the start of what has been one of the world’s fastest vaccination programs
Sudan hospital welcomes first patients after war forced it shut
- The Bahri Teaching Hospital, which, before the conflict, treated around 800 patients a day in its emergency department, was repeatedly attacked and looted
KHARTOUM: At a freshly renovated hospital in Khartoum, the medical team is beaming: Nearly three years after it was wrecked and looted in the early days of Sudan’s war, the facility has welcomed its first patients.
The Bahri Teaching Hospital in the capital’s north was stormed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, soon after fighting broke out between the RSF and Sudan’s army.
Bahri remained a war zone until an army counteroffensive pushed through Khartoum last year, recapturing the area from the RSF in March.
FASTFACT
Around 40 of Khartoum’s 120 hospitals, shut during the war, have resumed operations, according to the Sudan Doctors’ Network, a local medical group.
“We never thought the hospital would reopen,” said Dr. Ali Mohammed Ali, delighted to be back in his old surgical ward.
“It was completely destroyed; there was nothing left,” he said. “We had to start from scratch.”
Ali fled north from Khartoum in the early days of the war, working in a makeshift medical camp with “no gloves, no instruments, and no disinfectant.”
According to the World Health Organization, the conflict has forced the shutdown of more than two-thirds of Sudan’s health facilities and caused a world record number of deaths from attacks on health care infrastructure.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed across Sudan since the war began, while 11 million have been left displaced, triggering the world’s largest hunger crisis.
But with the RSF now driven out of Khartoum, Sudan’s government is gradually returning, and the devastated city is starting to rebuild.
Around 40 of Khartoum’s 120 hospitals, shut during the war, have resumed operations, according to the Sudan Doctors’ Network, a local medical group.
The Bahri Teaching Hospital, which, before the conflict, treated around 800 patients a day in its emergency department, was repeatedly attacked and looted.
“All the equipment was stolen,” said director Galal Mostafa, adding that about 70 percent of its buildings were damaged and the power system was destroyed.
“We were fortunate to receive two transformers just days ago,” said Salah Al-Hajj, the hospital’s chief executive.
During the first five days of fighting, Al-Hajj — an affable man with a sharp grey moustache — was trapped inside one wing of the hospital.
“We couldn’t leave because of the heavy gunfire,” he said, saying that anyone “who stepped outside risked being detained and beaten” by the RSF.
Patients were rushed to
safety in dangerous transfers to hospitals away from the fighting across the Nile.
“Vehicles had to take very complicated routes to evacuate patients safely, avoiding shells and bullets,” Al-Hajj said. On April 15, 2023, as the first shots rang out in the capital, RSF fighters seized Ali on his way into surgery.
They held him for two weeks at Soba, an RSF-run detention center in southern Khartoum whose former inmates have shared testimony of torture and inhumane conditions.
“When I was released, the country was in ruins,” he said.
Hospitals were “destroyed, streets devastated, and homes looted. There was nothing left.”
Almost three years on, taxis now drop patients at the hospital’s entrance, while new ambulances sit parked in a courtyard that until recently was strewn with rubble and overgrown weeds.
Inside, refurbished corridors smell of fresh paint.
The renovations and new equipment were funded by the Sudanese American Physicians Association and Islamic Relief USA at a cost of more than $2 million, according to the association.
Services have resumed in newly fitted emergency, surgical, obstetrics, and gynaecology rooms.
Doctors, nurses, and administrators hustle through the halls, the administrators fretting over covering salaries and running costs.
“Now it’s much better than before the war,” said Hassan Alsahir, a 25-year-old intern in the emergency department.
“It wasn’t this clean before, and we were short on beds — sometimes patients had to sleep on the floor.”
On its first day reopened, the hospital received a patient from the Kordofan region — the war’s current major battleground — for urgent surgery.
“The operation went well,” said Ali.
