A passenger who tested positive upon landing in Israel following a flight from Dubai managed to infect 180 Israelis in what was one of the largest chains of infections Israel has seen thus far, Channel 12 News reported Sunday, citing a Health Ministry source.
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Thanks to an epidemiological investigation, the IDF's Homefront Command was able to contact everyone that came into contact with the passenger, including during their stay in Dubai.
It remains unclear whether the passenger was carrying a mutated form of the virus, the report said.
Israel has recorded 601,069 coronavirus cases since the pandemic erupted in March 2020, including 4,437
deaths. Some 525,773 Israelis have recovered from the disease.
Meanwhile, the Knesset's Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee authorized a five-day shutdown of Ben-Gurion International Airport aimed at preventing the entry of any additional coronavirus strains into the country. Exceptions to the closure will be made for medical treatment, funerals, and legal proceedings, and on humanitarian grounds on a case-by-case basis.
Speaking at the meeting, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, who heads the Health Ministry's Public Health Services department, called for the airport closure to be extended to one month to ensure 3 million Israelis were vaccinated before the airport reopened.
"We must buy time for the residents of the State of Israel to be vaccinated. We will need a few weeks to allow the vaccination campaign to move ahead at a fast pace" so that even if other infectious variants arrive, we will be able to keep them under control, she said.
While the ministry's assumption was that the vaccines would prove effective against most mutations, she said it "takes time" to study each mutation and confirm whether the vaccine is in fact effective.
Alroy-Preis called the morbidity rate "very worrying."
"The number of confirmed cases has gone down but we have a record number of people on ventilators, something we have not seen before. When we were at 4,000 confirmed cases with a reproduction rate of 1.3, it was clear where we were headed. Now we have a reproduction rate of 0.9, but yesterday [Sunday], there was a record 67 deaths."
She said that at 40% of infections, children were being disproportionately affected by the UK variant of the virus. She noted that the increase in morbidity was prominent among six- to-nine-year-olds.
According to Health Ministry data released, Monday morning, Israel's infection rate stands at 9.3%, with 4,869 of the 54,113 people who tested for COVID-19 found to be carrying the virus. Israel currently has 70,859 active cases, 1,180 of which are serious.
According to Health Minister Yuli Edelstein, over 3.7 million doses of coronavirus vaccine have been administered since the beginning of Israel's vaccination campaign.
According to Health Ministry data, almost 30% of Israelis have received the first dose, while 12% have received both doses so far.
"This is the way to beat the virus," Edelstein said.
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