Posted on 11/24/21
| News Source: YNET News
Against the backdrop of resurging COVID-19 morbidity and the launch of Israel’s vaccine rollout for children aged 5–11, Israel’s coronavirus cabinet convened on Tuesday evening for the first time in almost two months and ruled to leave existing curbs on public gatherings in place for two more weeks, Yediot Achronot reports.
At the opening of the meeting, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett asked his ministers to support the burgeoning vaccine push for children and refrain from making statements that could hamper the country’s inoculation efforts.
Weizmann Institute of Science’s Prof. Eran Segal, a scientist advising the government on its pandemic response, turned the panel’s attention to the country’s waning “total immunization” — a term which encompasses all citizens who have some protection against coronavirus, including Israelis who have recovered from the pathogen, those who have received two vaccine doses fewer than six months ago, or those inoculated with a vaccine booster shot.
Segal’s findings indicate that Israel first began seeing a decline in total immunization in May, as the effects of the country’s original vaccine rollout began fading. Immunity levels rose again with the launch of the booster shot drive and peaked after a few months, also owing to high rates of recovery from COVID-19. Immunization again began to ebb in early November.
Segal warned that unless more people get vaccinated, immunization levels are expected to continue to drop in the coming months.
He also attributed the rise in morbidity to increasingly lax enforcement of health measures as well as mounting coronavirus infections among children as well over half of Israel’s recent new cases were recorded among children younger than 12.