Plan positive ‘if ’ implemented
For the hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and the tens of thousands more whose businesses have been decimated by COVID-19, one of the most painful aspects of the crisis is uncertainty.
The uncertainty about where the money will come from to pay the rent, the mortgage, the car payments, the kids’ tuition, even the shopping bill.
For salaried workers who have lost their jobs outright or were sent out on forced non-paid leave, the terrifying fear is what happens when those unemployment benefits run out.
And for business owners who somehow have been able to stay afloat until now – perhaps with the help of government grants disbursed in May – the incapacitating thought is what happens when that money ends, and the clients don’t return because, as a result of the pandemic, they simply can’t.
To those uncertainties,
THE BANK of Israel reported that the expected deficit the country will face due to Netanyahu’s plan will be NIS 170b. This is the “highest deficit since the 1980s,” Channel 13 reported.
The cost of the Netanyahu-Katz “safety net” would be NIS 15b. in 2020 and another NIS 27b. in 2021, the Bank of Israel said.
“I want to stress that the government has the means to fund the plan,” Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron said Sunday in a press release.
On Meet the Press, Katz was asked why he was not learning from France, where President Emmanuel Macron reportedly championed a national vocational training program.
Katz said his plan also includes a path for teaching people new skills that will help them land a job in, for example, the economic plan that the government is in the process of approving – it approved part on Sunday, and is expected to approve the rest on Monday – provides a partial solution.
To salaried workers no longer working, the plan says their unemployment benefits will not run out in another month, but will continue until next June. And to business owners whose turnover is down by at least 40%, the message is that they will get grants that should help cover business overhead and expenses every two months also until next June.
That’s the good news: The NIS 90 billion plan provides a strong safety net for the country’s citizens; not a short-term safety net, but one that will last for another year. Those payments should go a long way toward relieving the angst and anxiety that hundreds of thousands of people facing financial insecurity are feeling. These payments provide a much-needed horizon.
One of the plan’s downsides, however, is that it focuses on the immediate life raft and gives short shrift to repairing the damaged ship. The plan does expand professional retraining for some 50,000 people, with the hope that people who lost jobs during the virus can come back into the job market with skills better equipped to deal with a 21st-century economy. But more is needed in that direction and in charting how to rebuild and recalibrate the economy after the storm.
Nevertheless, the plan is a step in the right direction, and an indication that the government has internalized that the pandemic is not going to disappear with the summer’s heat, that Israel will not magically be able to defeat it, and that COVID-19 – and its economic fallout – will be here for months on end.
If during March and April the government’s economic policy was characterized by trying to put a Band-Aid on problems in the hope that this soon would all be behind us, now the understanding is that the phrase “living in the shadow of corona” means not only social distancing, masks and personal hygiene, but also that the government is going to have to provide massive financial assistance over the long term in a way that goes against the grain of the fiscal conservatives in the government.
But there is one major caveat
to the plan actually working, and that is that it is implemented. The plan looks impressive on paper, but will it be enacted?
The last four months have been a chronicle of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the government promising payments that – because of lack of oversight or technical and bureaucratic foul-ups – simply did not arrive. The Treasury recently admitted that of the NIS 30b. they had planned to disperse by the end of June, only NIS 14b. in payments were actually made.
In other words, the government talked a good game, promised a great deal of relief, but it failed to deliver.
And that failure to deliver was the trigger for the large demonstration in Tel Aviv on Saturday night of economic victims of the virus that took place after the plan was rolled out. One would have thought that less than 48 hours after the economic plan was announced, there would be nothing to demonstrate. That the protest went ahead and attracted as large a crowd as it did in the midst of a new outbreak of the virus sends a sharp message to Netanyahu, Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz and Finance Minister Israel Katz: We don’t trust you; we have no confidence in your ability to deliver on your promises.
Netanyahu and Katz told the public weeks ago that the money was going to be available in a matter of days. It wasn’t, and as a result, along with economic woes, many simply lost faith in government promises.
The government, by actually delivering this time, could help alleviate two serious ills presently besetting the country: the immediate economic despair of hundreds of thousands of people, and the public’s lack of trust and faith in its elected officials during a period when that trust is so badly needed. •
to this demand.
Earlier on Sunday, Shas MK Ya’acov Margi, who heads the Knesset Economy Committee, threatened to open a committee of inquiry into police violence during the COVID-19 crisis.
“Young police officers, don’t get in trouble because of your commanders,” he said on Twitter. “Everything is recorded. Coronavirus will pass, a committee of inquiry will be established, there will be attorneys who will make a lot of money out of it, and then in the halls of the courts you will be alone with your parents and a lot of legal expenses, and your commanders will get promotions. They will sell us fake values. I am disgusted by them.”
Meanwhile, Justice Ministry oversight czar David Rozen said on Sunday that the state prosecution should overrule the Police Investigations Department and order a criminal investigation of police for roughing up a protester four years ago.
His decision comes as alleged police brutality to protesters has been more prominent in the headlines in Israel, the US and worldwide.
Rozen, the former district judge who sent former prime minister Ehud Olmert to jail, is known for having an independent and outspoken streak.
In his decision, he wrote that the PID closed the case without properly questioning the two policemen accused of breaking the law by beating the protester.
Describing the event, he noted that there was a point where the peaceful protest, which lacked a permit and was unlawful, descended into some amount of violence.
When the police confronted the protester and instructed him to leave the area, he refused, insulted them and pushed one of them.
However, the protester said, after this exchange, he did listen to their directive, left the area and was already 50 meters away and on the way home when the policemen attacked him.
The protester was arrested and questioned for allegedly attacking the policemen, while he simultaneously filed a complaint against the policemen for illegally beating him.
Both cases were dismissed as groundless. But the PID did not bother to question the police officers involved, saying a video and reports that were filed about the incident were sufficient.
The PID has argued that Rozen and the prosecution should not reevaluate the case since whether to close a case is at the discretion of the PID.
Rozen said the PID’s failure to interview the policemen was inexcusable and that the case must be reopened to complete the probe properly.
The video the PID said it had based its decision on did not record the alleged beating incident, he said.
The state prosecution should reopen the case or it will appear as if the PID took the side of the police without any confirming evidence and resolving the different versions of what occurred, Rozen said.
The police and the PID have been on the defensive recently for the killing of Ethiopian-Israeli Solomon Tekah, the killing of east Jerusalem special-needs student Iyad al-Halak and the arrest and beating of protesters from different backgrounds demonstrating against Netanyahu regarding bribery charges and his handling of the coronavirus. •
from? How many of them had symptoms, how fast did they know, and how many patients were asymptomatic?”
“We need to be much more sophisticated than just analyzing the number of new cases, severe cases and deaths,” he said. “It is very hard to get the raw data according to individual cases and not just aggregated according to age or region. We want to do multivariate analysis, and we cannot… There is a lot of bureaucracy.”
Even worse, Davidovitch said, many of the epidemiological investigations are being recorded by hand on paper, which means there is a long delay between input of the information and when it is finally synced with the Health Ministry and other data.
Since Health Minister Yuli Edelstein took office in May, and even more so with the entrance of new director-general Prof. Chezy Levy, the data has become more accessible to the public. The daily situation report is updated to the ministry’s coronavirus website as often as three times per day. Moreover, in recent weeks, the ministry has rolled out both a printed and video explainer as to how to understand the data dashboard.
The site also includes an option to download an Excel file with specific data points: the date and number of people tested; number of people in serious condition, in the hospital and ventilated; total number of patients and total number of dead.
But it is not enough, Leshem said.
“The Health Ministry needs more resources” to enable it to carry out this function, which is “critical during a major outbreak,” he said.
Leshem recommended that good data management be harnessed from outside the ministry to help support these efforts. •
with a sick person at an unknown location.
The conditions at gyms and pools lend themselves to increased infection, and that is why the Health Ministry advised the government to shut them down, Ennis told the committee. Among the conditions at gyms: close quarters, heat and humidity, breathing more and more deeply and touching the surfaces of shared equipment. Among the conditions at pools: no mask wearing, crowding and difficulty in observing the rules of hygiene.
“It is imperative to find the delicate balance between maintaining public health and the duty to maintain people’s livelihoods,” Knesset coronavirus committee chairwoman Yifat Shasha-Biton said at the start of the session. “We must understand what underlies every decision – understand the logic behind these decisions. The issue of social distancing and the observance of Health Ministry guidelines are critical to preventing an outbreak, but also to allowing the economy to function.”
“We have no magic solution,” Health Ministry deputy director-general Itamar Grotto said at a meeting earlier in the day.
In her presentation, Ennis said there was an increase in the number of difficult patients.
According to the Health Ministry, there was no change in the criteria for who is considered a serious patient, despite reports by the N12 news site to the contrary.
The Health Ministry released a backgrounder on Sunday detailing this criterion, as defined by the World Health Organization. Those with mild symptoms have a low fever, cough, weakness and potentially a loss of taste or smell. Those with moderate symptoms have been diagnosed via a clinical or X-ray with “COVID-19 pneumonia.” Serious patients, as suffering from dyspnea (a respiratory rate of 30 or more breaths per minute), have a blood-oxygen saturation of 93% or less, a ratio of the partial pressure of arterial oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen (PaO2:FiO2) of less than 300 mm Hg.
“This criteria creates a condition that only a third of the severely ill are intubated,” Dr. Michael Halbertal told N12. “It is a huge deviation; it should be the other way around. In March, the ratio was 80% of all patients were in serious condition. Currently, the ratio is 36%. This is unreasonable. There is no patient with pneumonia who is not intubated or in need of oxygen.”
Ennis noted that, “If the upward trend in the number of serious patients continues, then the number of these will exceed the number in the first wave.
“Two days ago, there were 35 new serious patients added in one day, which is more than the peak day in the first wave – 29 new serious patients in a day,” she said. “It is our job to stop the outbreaks before they start. After there is already an outbreak, it is very difficult to stop the spread.”
Meanwhile, Israel is running low on the potentially life-saving drug Remdesivir, according to health officials. Some hospitals have even run out.
“We are trying to get a hold of it,” Sheba Medical Center’s Galia Rahav told The Jerusalem Post. She said US President Donald Trump “bought all of it and none of it is left for the whole world.”
She said that Israel has been low on the drug since last weekend.
Just this week, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Gilead Sciences, the creators of the drug, reported that Remdesivir potently inhibited the virus in human lung cell cultures and that it improved lung function in mice infected with the virus, a report by Vanderbilt said.
Other studies suggested that patients who received the drug recovered more quickly.
Director of the International Relations Division for the Health Ministry, Asher Shalmon, confirmed that this is a challenge the country is dealing with, and sources in the know told the Post that Israel has tried to obtain additional supplies of the drug through direct inquiries to Gilead.
The source also said that Israel could resort to using intelligence or diplomatic means to secure the drug.
In addition, last week, it was reported that the drug maker Mylan would launch a generic version of Remdesivir, which the source said could make the shortage less severe.
“The shortage is not just about now, but come fall and winter when we could have a third wave, this drug will be even more important,” the source said.
Rahav told the Post that in the meantime the hospital is using plasma and other combination viral and pneumonia drugs to treat seriously ill patients.
In the global fight against COVID-19, the World Health Organization reported a record increase in coronavirus cases on Sunday, with the total rising by 230,370 in 24 hours.
The biggest increases were from the United States, Brazil, India and South Africa, according to a daily report. The previous WHO record for new cases was 228,102 on July 10. Deaths remained steady at about 5,000 a day.
Global coronavirus cases were approaching 13 million on Sunday, according to a Reuters tally, marking another milestone in the spread of the disease that has killed more than 565,000 people in seven months
Gil Hoffman, Tamar Beeri and Reuters contributed to this report. •