Israeli physicians group: Only test, quarantine those with COVID symptoms

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The Israel Association of Public Health Physicians called upon Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to limit testing and quarantine to symptomatic COVID-19 patients, people at high risk or people who regularly come in contact with a high-risk population.

The Israeli government’s current policy of testing asymptomatic people and logging them as active cases after testing positive in a laboratory test “creates a distorted picture regarding the scope of infection and leads to widespread isolation, the benefit of which is not clear,” the public physicians’ group stated in a letter to Bennett over the weekend.

The group said that the quarantine policy “is eroding essential resources during a pandemic, particularly of medical personnel and of other essential staff while seriously harming the education system without justification.”