Jerusalem | Less than a month into a COVID-19 vaccine booster drive, Israel is seeing signs of an impact on the country’s high infection and severe illness rates fuelled by the fast-spreading delta variant, officials and scientists say.
Delta hit Israel in June, just as the country began to reap the benefits of one of the world’s fastest vaccine rollouts.
With an open economy and most curbs scrapped, Israel went from single-digit daily infections and zero deaths to around 7500 daily cases last week, 600 people hospitalised in serious condition and more than 150 people dying in that week alone.
On July 30, it began administering a third dose of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine to people over 60, the first country to do so. On Thursday it expanded eligibility to 30-year-olds and up whose second dose was given at least five months prior, saying the age may drop further.
In the past 10 days, the pandemic is abating among the first age group, more than a million of whom have received a third vaccine dose, according to Israeli health ministry data and scientists interviewed by Reuters.
The rate of disease spread among vaccinated people age 60 and over – known as the reproduction rate – began falling steadily around August 13 and has dipped below 1, indicating that each infected person is transmitting the virus to fewer than one other person. A reproduction rate of less than 1 means an outbreak is subsiding.
Read the article by Maayan Lubell in the Financial Review.