More corona repercussions

Regarding “Coronaovirus lockdown ‘unnecessary? Some Israeli researchers think so’” (April 30), it seems that today’s academicians, regardless of their area of expertise, are devoting their time to building statistical models relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and many are directed at criticizing Israel’s lockdown policies.

The work cited was based on two assumptions: 1) “In countries where the number of intensive care beds per million people is above the threshold of about 100, closures are unnecessary.

2) “The model assumes that the goal is not to overburden the healthcare system, as opposed to reducing the amount of infection or saving lives”.

The first assumption is factually wrong and the second is morally repugnant

The United States leads the world in the number of ICU beds per million of population with 347 and at the same time is at the head of the list with over a million cases and more than 60,000 deaths. I shudder to think what these numbers would be without a lockdown.

Our primary goal must ultimately be the saving of lives and we must direct our efforts to maximize that objective.

One approach that has been generally overlooked and whose statistics are underutilized is the mortality rate; not per capita but rather per reported cases of illness. We must understand why countries such as Spain, Italy, France, the UK, Belgium, Holland and Sweden all have mortality rates in excess of 10%; The USA about 6% and Germany and Austria about 3%.

Amazingly, in Israel the rate has been steady at 1.3%.

DR. SAMUEL DERSHOWITZ Jerusalem

Due to the pandemic, there is much less driving and many fewer accidents. In the US, insurance companies have returned money to their policy holders. Why is that not done here? They have a windfall of money that they’re not spending on claims and most of that should be returned. TZVI STERNLICHT Rehovot

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert (“What was Benny Gantz really thinking?” April 24) accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of exaggerating the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic in order to pressure Benny Gantz into forming a government with him on terms favorable to Netanyahu. As evidence of this, Olmert points to the fact that Netanyahu had earlier predicted that there could be a million coronavirus cases in Israel by the end of April, while in fact there were only 15,000 cases at the time Olmert was writing.

While it is true that Netanyahu has a history of manipulating people’s fears for his own political benefit, in this case Olmert is wrong, and reveals his ignorance of the meaning of exponential growth.

In almost every country in the world, coronavirus cases initially doubled every three days. That is this virus’s natural rate of increase, in the absence of social distancing measures. To go from 15,000 cases to a million cases, the number of cases would have to double six times, increasing by a factor of 64. In the absence of social distancing measures, this would take only 18 days.

If Netanyahu had not made the early decisions he did to reduce the rate of transmission of the coronavirus in Israel, but had dithered for 18 more days before doing anything, then we could indeed have had a million cases by now. Netanyahu, for all his serious faults, at least has a degree from MIT and understands what exponential growth is.

MICHAEL GERVER Ra’anana