Israel is heading to a nationwide lockdown by September, some health officials believe, but there are 1.1 million ways to prevent it, according to Prof. Eran Segal, a computational biologist for the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot who has been advising the government throughout the pandemic.
Israel’s closure will be the result of the 1.1 million Israelis who can get vaccinated but have not yet, he wrote in a column on the N12 news site that published over the weekend.
“There is no real progress against this group,” Segal wrote. “We all feel, and will continue to feel, the consequences.”
His column appeared the day before N12 released data provided by IDF Home Front Command’s Alon headquarters that said the reproduction rate among unvaccinated individuals was 5.6, or 6.5 times higher than the 0.86 rate among vaccinated individuals.
The reproduction rate, commonly referred to as the “R,” represents the number of people a sick person will infect.
Throughout the crisis, morbidity has only successfully been brought under control by two actions: vaccination or lockdown.
When the rate of vaccination stopped increasing because Israel failed to convince the unvaccinated to get the jab, “we were left with a situation that allowed for a widespread outbreak, especially in an encounter with a strong and contagious strain like the Delta variant,” Segal said.
“The Green Pass was intended to get those people vaccinated, but in reality, this did not affect the unvaccinated group.”
When Israel saw the first outbreaks of the Delta variant, the recommendation was to concentrate most on getting those 1.1 million eligible Israelis inoculated – all people over the age of 12 – because “in our estimation, vaccination of a significant proportion of them would inhibit the current outbreak and halt its growth rate,” Segal said. “But unfortunately, we failed to vaccinate this group.”
Outside of Israel, aggressive measures have been taken to convince people to vaccinate. For example, both Google and Facebook said they would not allow unvaccinated employees to come to the office. Google employs 135,000 people, and Facebook has 58,600.
In the US, financial or other incentives are being offered in various states to get people to take advantage of the vaccine. Kanye West offered Pfizer vaccines to fans attending his “listening party” over the weekend.
But in Israel, aside from the Green Pass rules, the government has taken little action, and people can continue to go to work, even in the healthcare field or in schools, without being vaccinated, Segal said.
Now, closure is imminent.
“Because we were unable to stop the situation with vaccines, only the possibility of quarantine to curb morbidity remains,” Segal wrote. “In order not to hurt the economy, the government did not want to impose a lockdown and [instead] decided on a series of restrictions: expanding isolation for those who return to Israel from abroad, asking parents of verified children to be isolated and more.
“No one thinks that these restrictions will stop the disease; at most, they will slow it down,” he continued. “And because the government is not going to close at this stage, the actual meaning is that Israel is implementing a policy of ‘mass contagion’ without declaring it. The morbidity will continue to rise, and soon, hundreds of thousands of infected [people] (vaccinated or not) will accumulate.”
Most of the sick will recover, and then they will be “naturally vaccinated,” but as the number grows, the country will pay a price in severe and dying patients, Segal said.
It is possible that the large number of recovered people will curb morbidity before Israel reaches the point at which hospitals cannot manage the patient load and break down, “but there is no certainty about that,” he said, adding that if not, a lockdown would likely be imposed.
“Without dramatic change, we will reach the hospitals’ capacity threshold between the end of August and the third weekend of September,” Segal wrote. “The models show that the number of infections in the coming month will be large, and when you take into account that 1% to 2% of them will be seriously ill, the workload in the hospitals will increase.”
“It is unfortunate that we have reached this point, since there is a high probability the containment of the disease could have been affected by vaccinating a considerable part of the 1.1 million who had not yet been vaccinated,” he wrote.
“This has been and remains the national mission, where efforts should be invested, but we have been failing at this mission for seven weeks,” Segal concluded. “The lockdown, if it happens, will be imposed mainly because this group has not been vaccinated.”