Health Ministry: Country not yet ready for first stage of exit strategy
Schools unlikely to open on Sunday, says head of public health
A fight between the Health Ministry and some members of Blue and White over when and how much the country will open is likely to occur on Tuesday at the coronavirus cabinet meeting.
The ministry wants to wait until there are no more than 2,000 new daily infections before opening up anything, while party members want to see some businesses and preschools resume operation as early as this week.
Sharon Alroy- Preis, the head of Public Health Services, said on Sunday that “in my opinion, no” – schools will not open in seven days.
She said the Health Ministry is measuring the country’s reproduction rate, otherwise known as R, and it is definitely not under one. The ministry’s exit strategy requires an R of 0.8 – that one coronavirus patient infects less than one other person – and 2,000 or fewer new corona patients per day.
She added that despite the numbers that were seen on
Sunday when testing hit a low of less than 13,000 in a single day, health experts assume that Israel is still holding at around 3,000 new patients per day.
“This means that we are not holding at the rate of
infection that we set for the first stage” of the exit strategy, which will be discussed and hopefully passed in some form at the cabinet meeting later this week. “We must move according to data and not dates.”
Alroy- Preis said that “I am also a mother of children in first and third grades and I want to know when they will go to school, but I know that it is forbidden to set a date and open studies according to it.”
The head of public health convened the briefing on Sunday to review the ministry’s exit plan, which has nine stages and could take as long as four months to complete. In between each stage there is supposed to be two weeks for evaluation of the impact of the previous stage on the rate of infection.
“The data today is encouraging, but this is the data from the weekend, so we have to be very careful,” she said at the start of the discussion. “We still do not think that we have reached our goal.”
On Sunday, the Health Ministry reported that only 888 new patients were diagnosed on Saturday – out of the 13,409 screened, some 6.6% tested positive. There were 824 people in serious condition, including 230 who were