No decision on lockdown as third wave fears rise
ISRAEL IS still emerging from its second nationwide lockdown, with many of the restrictions still in place, and public health experts are already warning that in a month, when Chanukah begins, the country will be in a third wave. For the past two weeks the daily number of infections has not gone down and continues hover between 600 and 800, while the R is back up to 1.0.
As a result, the government has delayed a decision on whether to continue opening up the country. With the exception of the Charedi education system which is fully open, in defiance of the law, all classes of year 5 and above remain online, shopping centrs are still closed, as are all restaurants and any form of public entertainment. The cabinet met on Wednesday with the original intent of voting on nightly curfews, but it dispersed without any decision being taken. Instead, the entrance of Israelis to Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank has now been prohibited as the epidemiologists believe that one of the reasons for the rise in infections in the ArabIsraeli sector is their frequent visits to the West Bank. At the same time, the Knesset passed a new law which will allow businesses to open in designated isolated tourist areas, such as the hotels by the Dead Sea and Eilat on the Red Sea, if all those who enter the area are tested for the virus before arrival.
As stock markets surged this week around the world at the news that Pfizer had succeeded in developing a vaccine, there was also dejection in Israel. Months earlier, the government had decided to order millions of vaccine from another pharmaceutical giant,
Moderna, and also to invest in developing a local vaccine. However, after talks between Israeli officials and senior executives at Pfizer, it was made clear that the American-German partnership that developed Pfizer’s vaccine is prepared to sifweaesa gn a contract immediately with Israel and add it to the countries who will be receiving the vaccine early, partly due to the Jewish roots of senior executives and shareholders, and partly because the relatively small number of vaccines Israel requires will not make much of a dent in the plans of the company, which has been gearing up to fill all the needs of the US and
EU. Mr Netanyahu rushed to record a message saying that he had personally spoken with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, a Greek-Jew, and claiming that the deal, which is still facing various legal and logistical obstacles, is due to Mr Bourla’s admiration for his “building up of the relations between Greece and Israel.”