• Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

Epidemiologists Estimate almost Half of Israeli Population Caught Omicron

Feb 22, 2022

All throughout the last week, the pandemic has continued to retreat in Israel as well as globally, after a staggering number of infections had occurred due to the Omicron variant that was discovered a few months ago. Israel saw 2.2 million confirmed cases of the Omicron variant, but according to epidemiologist Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute, the actual number of cases in the country is far higher. On Friday, he said that the actual number of cases was close to 4.5 million, which is nearly half of the total 9 million population in Israel. Segal said that almost 70% of the Israeli population has been infected since the pandemic first began, which is around 6 to 7 million people.

In recent weeks, the number of new cases of COVID-19 have been on a decline in Israel, after they had reached a peak in the last month. Therefore, the government has begun to roll back some of the rules it had put in place for containing the Omicron wave of the coronavirus. On Friday, the Health Ministry reported that almost 15,358 new infections had been diagnosed a day earlier. In January, when the outbreak had hit its peak, there had been a record number of 85,185 cases recorded in the country.

On Friday, the total number of active infections in Israel stood at 152,411, which included about 808 serious cases of the virus. The Health Ministry further disclosed that about 249 Israelis had died in the past week because of the coronavirus, which pushed up the total death toll in the country to 9,828. On Thursday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had said that the fifth wave was ‘breaking’ in the country. He and other top officials agreed that it was time for scrapping the Green Pass certificate system from the beginning of the next month. 

However, there will be some other restrictions that will continue to be active. On Wednesday, the Health Ministry had recommended that rules be eased for the Israeli travelers who are coming from abroad. The global surge in cases had lasted for about three and a half months and now, the average number of cases declined for the third consecutive week. According to the latest statistics, there was a 22% decline in global new cases, as they reached 1.97 million. The Middle East, Africa, Latin America, North America and Europe all saw their number of daily cases drop, while they remained steady in Oceania and Asia.

The biggest drop in daily cases was seen in Sweden, as they declined by almost 78%. There was a spike in daily cases in Oceania and South East Asia, particularly in Malaysia, South Korea, New Zealand, Vietnam and Hong Kong. This week, Russia surpassed the US with the highest number of cases that averaging about 187,500 a day. The total number of cases in US on a daily basis were 119,600. There was also a 7% global decline in the number of deaths linked to COVID-19, as there was an average of 11,355 cases in a day. 

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