6.69% of COVID-19 tests return positive, highest in Israel’s 4th wave
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) statistics in Israel continued to climb and set new negative records, as 6.69% of the 155,351 Corona tests done Tuesday returned positive, the highest rate in Israel’s fourth COVID-19 wave that began in June.
The Corona ICU at Tel Hashomer Hospital. (Eitan Elhadaz/TPS)
For the second day in a row, the number of new cases documented in 24 hours stood at close to 10,000, 9,891 according to the Ministry of Health, while the record of 10,118 new cases in one day, which was set in January, is expected to be reset in the coming days.
A high number of 692 are in serious condition, and 129 are on life support, as seven hospitals in Israel have closed their doors to new patients on Wednesday, saying they have not received the funding promised by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s government and therefore are unable to provide further care. The staff in these hospitals on strike are tending to emergencies only.
A week ahead of the scheduled opening of the school year, 7% of the students tested positive for COVID-19, and 10% of the educational staff who tested for the virus on Tuesday returned positive. Over 90,200 students are in quarantine and 30,646 are active patients, meaning that some 121,000 would not be able to attend school.
While the government has declared it will fully open the school year as planned on September 1, initial reports indicate that this decision is being rethought and that an updated announcement is expected on Sunday.
Professor Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and an expert on COVID-19 in Israel, pointed to a ray of light and noted the continued decrease in the infection coefficients (R), and while they are still above 1 and there still is an increase in morbidity, the rate is slowing down.
The R for new patients in serious condition is 1.06, and the R for new verified cases is 1.14.
The third booster vaccine, which was administered to over 1,673,000 Israelis, “reduces the percentage of verified cases that become serious,” he explained.
6,880 Israelis have died of the virus, including 10 in the past 24 hours.
