Israel’s corona rate surpasses USA

Israel doing poorly as the country hits the top rankings with no change yet from the national lockdown.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

Latest statistics on the coronavirus spread in Israel show that the infection rate in the Jewish state is now higher than in America, Channel 12 reported Monday.

Israel is breaking corona morbidity records and is now one of the leading countries in the world in terms of the number of people infected with the coronavirus in relation to the size of the population.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, as of Monday Israel has 2,115.1 cases per 100,000 population, which is now higher than the 2,079.9 per 100,000 for the U.S.. However, Brazil and Peru still have worse per capita infection rates.

A weighting of the data reveals a situation that illustrates how serious the situation here is: currently, there are 20,562 corona patients per million people in Israel – a higher figure than in the United States, where the number of infected is 20,475 people per million people.

A report released Monday from the government’s corona Intelligence and Information Center states that since the beginning of September the epidemic has spread rapidly at a rate of 5 percent per day. The increase in morbidity is in all sectors, but is particularly noticeable in the ultra-Orthodox sector.

“It is too early to assess the impact of the closure,” the report’s authors wrote, referring to the nation-wide lockdown that went into effect Friday afternoon in which most of the education system has been shut down and people are generally restricted to remain within one kilometer (0.6 miles) of their homes.

The reported noted that it “seems that there is a lack of enforcement and support from the authorities in the red localities,” referring the towns and cities the government designated as “red” due to high infections rates where residents are not allowed out of the municipal boundaries except in rare exceptions. Israel television news channels widely reported a beach protest held in Tel Aviv on Saturday during which most protesters did not wear masks or maintain social distancing, with some calling the lockdown a “political” move.

While Israel’s morbidity rate has been climbing over the past months, there has been a sharp rise in recent weeks in parallel with the opening of the education system, which is now locked down.

“Israel has been one of the leading countries in the per-capita illness rate for some time,” said Prof. Ronit Calderon-Margalit of the Hebrew University and Hadassah School of Public Health. “If the reason for this was a high number of tests – we would see that the rate of positive tests is low, but unfortunately this is not the case. The rate is about 11 percent positive and this is a high figure relative to the world.”

Several hospitals on Monday announced that their coronavirus wards were full and they were diverting seriously ill corona patients to other hospitals.

Within just one month, coronavirus hospitalizations have nearly doubled from 764 on August 21 to 1,361 on September 21, with the number of people in serious condition also increasing from 390 to 653. In that month an additional 463 Israelis succumbed to the disease, bringing the death toll to 1,272.