New COVID rant from a layman

Hello, all.

Some of you might have read my previous rant here. If you have not, you did not lose much. Here is another rant, this one is much calmer and, actually, has some mild respect for our decision makers. I am in a haste to write this, because I feel that I will be disappointed in them again, any day now.

So, how are things going in Israel with COVID? It is FUN! We had a steady flow of new cases for the last 2 months now with daily numbers of between 1500 to 2000. For 9mln strong country these number are huge. Any European government, who were facing these rates of infection, would have locked everything down and forgot where it hid the keys. But not in Israel! After the spring victory of Covid, which turned into a complete fiasco a month later, talks of a new lock down resemble empty threats of a tired parent to a naughty child – “behave or else”.  The “else” means lock down, but it never comes, because the child is also literate and knows it’s rights.

So, in the rare reprieve from inter-party feuds, when our ministers are actually doing their jobs, the following was accomplished (ordered from WTF to “it’s about effing time”):

1.      The international flights were partially open to several European “green” countries. Apparently, the tourism workers in Greece, Croatia, Bulgaria and other countries are way more scared of going broke than of getting sick from Covid.

2.      Leisure hotels are open and nobody really keeps up with the rules there. Domestic travel is at all-time high.

3.      Tens of thousands of Breslaw Hassidic followers are trying to get to Ukraine for yearly worship on Rabbi Nachman’s tomb. For almost 2 weeks both governments are trying to stop this from happening, but both have strong lobbies (political and economical), who are pushing this thing forward. Going to be fun watching this unfold.

4.      The school year is about to start and children under the age of 10 will study almost normally. This is a huge deal for a country with average number of children in the family being 3.1.

So, as I said already, the lock down is being threatened by the government, but few people seem to take notice. Fewer and fewer citizens believe that it will materialize and there are a few actual reasons for it.

1.      We still have less than 500 severe cases in the hospitals. That’s with over 20,000 active “infected/sick” people in the country. People get sick, but most tend to recover quickly.

2.      Even though we had over 700 deaths since January, it seems to go unnoticed. The main reason for it – the average age of those who die is 82 and they are usually very sick from unrelated diseases. 82 also happens to be our life expectancy of natural causes, so it is very difficult to pressure people on this one.

3.      The country has practical resources to deal with 2000 simultaneous severe cases and still has another 2000 for emergency reserve (calling in the military, setting up Corona MASHes, etc). Since we have less than 500 severe cases now, the common logic goes that in order to get to these numbers we will need 100,000 active cases in the whole country of just 9mln people. We are likely to run out of people to get infected way before these numbers are reached.

4.      The official number of Israelis, who got infected since January is just over 100,000 (80,000 recovered). But in the last month there was less and less motivation for young people to go and get tested, because nobody wants to go to quarantine. As a result, the estimated number of recovered people is now between 250,000 to 0.5mln. Which is impossible to prove, of course, because nobody wants to get tested unless he actually feels sick.

So, it is my guess that our decision-makers finally made the right decision: give all the possible resources to the medic, bring in the military if required, and prevent the new lock down. Let’s hope this decision holds.