Scaring the public into obedience
Along with the worrisome upward curve of Israelis getting infected by the coronavirus, there also has been another steadily rising curve that has impacted our lives: new strict measures the government is instituting in gradual steps.
First it was not sneezing on your fellow, then it was keeping a distance of one meter, then two meters, then no gatherings larger than 10,000, then 5,000, then 100, then 10, and then no gatherings at all.
The cabinet met late Tuesday evening to consider more measures to prevent Israel from hurtling toward an Italian fate, where more than 6,000 people have died, and more than 60,000 have become infected with the virus.
Irwin Mansdorf, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs specializing in political psychology, said the professional term for this type of gradual approach to essentially clamping a lockdown on the country is the “success of approximation.”
The idea is that “if you want someone to get somewhere, they are not going to do it in one shot,” he said. “No one is going to stop smoking in one day, but if you say that instead of 10 cigarettes a day, smoke nine, and then go down to eight and then seven, then they will do it.”
The same idea is at work here. There was a need to habituate the public to these strict decrees, Mansdorf said, since it would have been unable to abide by them had they been declared all at one time. It is unwise, he said, quoting a Talmudic dictum, to order a decree that the public will simply be unable to abide.
Tal Brosh Nissimov, coordinator of the Health Ministry team set up to fight plagues, agreed in a Kan Bet interview that this is the reason the stiff measures that the country is facing now were not instituted at the very beginning of the crisis several weeks ago.
“There is a psychology involved in dealing with this crisis,” he said. “You can’t do something like this – perhaps justifiably – before people start getting sick. You do it gradually according to the risk level.”
Taking the public’s mindset into account is a major factor involved in deciding what measures to implement, and when.
Much of the world right now is looking at South Korea, one of only two badly infected nations – along with China – that has flattened the coronavirus curve of the number of people infected.
Dozens of articles have been written about how they did it, trying to figure out what their secret is: from the quick decision to test as many people as
benefits in March, including 18,105 people between 7 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
According to Bank of Israel estimates published on Tuesday, current measures to contain the novel coronavirus are likely to result in an unemployment rate of approximately 7%, an increase of 150,000 people, by the end of 2020.
“We must help individuals whose company or turnover has been impacted, and they must continue to meet their ongoing expenses,” Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron said. “We also need to help those who have been made redundant or have been placed on unpaid leave, and their income has been affected dramatically. This is what governments around the world are doing and on a huge scale.”
Meanwhile, most infected people have mild cases of the virus – 1,795 – and another 45 are in moderate condition, the Health Ministry reported.
The man who died on Monday had been brought to Hadassah-University Medical Center from the Nofim Geriatric Center, where he lived. Shortly before news of his death, the second coronavirus patient who died was identified as Malka Kever, 67, from Bat Yam. She died at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon. She had preexisting conditions.
“Our intensive care team fought for her life with great dedication, but her condition deteriorated,” the hospital said.
Kever was patient No. 445. She had previously volunteered at the hospital where she died, until she was diagnosed with cancer in the last year, N12 reported.
Her family members, who are in isolation, called on the public to “stay home.”
“Don’t go out, you risk yourself, your children, your relatives and people you don’t know,” Kever’s daughter, Dorit, told N12. “My mother gave her life, gave her soul to the Creator because of this illness. We are hurting, we are sad.”
The man in his 60s who died Monday at Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital) in Tel Aviv and was suspected of having coronavirus had not contracted the disease, the hospital reported. Test results revealed that the man had respiratory symptoms and his death, as determined by the hospital, was probably from a different viral disease.
In a related development, a premature baby at the prenatal ward of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem was reported on Tuesday as not having had the novel coronavirus after it was earlier reported that a worker of the ward was infected with the virus and might have infected him. All the premature babies in the ward were found not to have the virus, and the hospital is working alongside the Health Ministry to proceed with removing the workers of the ward out of quarantine per the regulations.
Some 53 people have recovered from the virus.
So far, more than 135,000 Israelis have spent time in quarantine. The Health Ministry said 71,029 are in isolation now, including another member of the government.
Diaspora Affairs Minister Tzipi Hotovely became the latest MK to enter home quarantine on Tuesday, bringing the number up to eight. Hotovely came in contact with a deputy
director-general of her ministry who was later diagnosed with the virus. She will need to be quarantined until April 1.
Hotovely is the sixth MK from Netanyahu’s right-center bloc in quarantine, joining ministers Tzachi Hanegbi (Likud), Arye Deri (Shas), Bezalel Smotrich (Yamina) and Shas MKs Itzik Cohen and Moshe Abutbul. The only quarantined MKs from the left-center bloc are Alon Shuster and Ran Ben-Barak.
The number of infected people is expected to climb as Israel conducts more coronavirus tests. In the last 24 hours, more than 3,700 people were screened. On Monday, Magen David Adom opened up three more drive-through testing complexes in Jerusalem, Beersheba and Haifa.
In total, according to the ministry, 27,054 tests had been taken by Tuesday morning.
Gil Hoffman and Eytan Halon contributed to this report. •