Israel’s COVID rhetoric turns grim, reflecting real trouble

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The Israeli government this week sharply changed its tone, and apparently also its policy, in regard to the spread of the coronavirus.

The moderate measures, which also were adopted late, were replaced by warnings about a fourth wave, horror scenarios of thousands of seriously ill and talk of a definite lockdown during the Jewish religious festivals in September – a lockdown that would last for six to eight weeks.

The zigzag in the declarations reflects genuine distress. Other countries, too, have found themselves in a similar situation due to the resilience of the delta variant, which undermined earlier hopes of achieving herd immunity.

In the absence of any other solution on the horizon, Israel decided to accelerate a third booster shot for those aged 60 and over. That move drew a high public response this week. The hope is that the mass vaccination of the elderly and most at-risk will improve their level of protection and help stem a rise in serious illness in another few weeks.

However, despite all the warnings and all the pleading, the operation to vaccinate the general public has almost ground to a halt, and even the 12-15 age group is not hurrying to get the vaccine. Slightly more than a million Israelis aged 12 and over who are eligible for the vaccine have chosen not to avail themselves of that option. The low response is especially clear among the Arab public, where the rate of serious illness surged this week after Eid al-Fitr.

This phenomenon appears to stem more from indifference than to sweeping ideological opposition to vaccination. Overall, and fortunately for Israel, the vaccination issue did not become a political dispute between right and left, as happened in the United States.

The coronavirus cabinet this week approved a series of logical decisions – the return of the green pass; a slight restriction on public gatherings; enforcement of self-isolation – in the light of the growing incidence of sickness. But the poor response of the weary and battered public to the directives will make it hard to bring about a change in the morbidity rate.

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An increasing number of experts are recommending a lockdown, probably from the beginning of September. Like the Netanyahu-Gantz government before it, the Bennett-Lapid government is also apparently heading for a lengthy lockdown, which will be the fourth since the pandemic erupted in March 2020.

Even as ministers repeat the mantra that “lockdown has to be the last resort,” they continue to minimize the debate about the multiple negative effects of lockdowns. The economic, health and mental damage of the lockdowns is immense and will be felt across many social classes and different age groups. No one can evaluate what a third disrupted school year will do to the education and social skills of children, or what a third winter in isolation will do to the mental health of the elderly.

The expected damage is also not presented in an orderly way to the government. And the decision of two key ministers – Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman – to absent themselves from the coronavirus cabinet meetings does not send a serious message to the country’s citizens.

One subject that has been omitted from the current discussions is that of breaking the chain of infection, which just a year ago was presented to us by numerous experts (genuine or imaginary) as the most effective means against the spread of the virus.

At the moment, the state is not enforcing isolation on vaccinated individuals who have been exposed to someone infected (even though it’s known that the delta variant infects some vaccinated people). The Shin Bet security service has ceased – and rightly so – to track the cellphones of citizens and has resumed dealing with the maters for which it was established. And even the Alon directorate established by the IDF, which again received hundreds of slots to staff this week, is investing only a limited effort in epidemiological investigations to reconstruct the movements of those who fell ill and of the people they came in contact with.

Baed on the claims of other governments, breaking the chain of infection succeeded in totalitarian states (China) and in democracies where draconian measures were introduced to achieve “zero coronavirus” (New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Singapore). Success of that sort, which will always be partial, entails serious scars on the psyche of the population. Even countries that were considered the glory of Western democracy left their citizens with serious misgivings in the wake of restrictions on human rights and invasions of privacy.

In Israel, data collected during the epidemic showed that many of the sick lied in the investigations, and that self-isolation had only limited results. Recently, without many declarations, that element of the system has been almost abandoned. At the current rate of illness – more than 3,000 confirmed positive cases daily – the entire effort is already less relevant.

The virus, which will likely be with us for a long time yet, continues to shatter many of the prior assumptions about it. This is further proof that journalists, too, would do well to display a little more skepticism in light of the magic solutions proposed by experts, who promise that they have supposedly found the most effective means and methods to curb the epidemic.