With COVID Contained, Israel Lifts Many Restrictions
With COVID Contained, Israel Lifts Many Restrictions
June 1, 2021 - Summarized from The New York Times
The New York Times – With new coronavirus cases dropping to below 20 a day, Israel on Tuesday retired its Green Pass system and will now allow equal access to restaurants, sports events, cultural activities and the like to vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens. Restrictions on the sizes of gatherings have also been lifted.
Life returns to normal in Tel Aviv as Israel lifts many COVID-19 restrictions.
The decision came less than three months after Israel, a real-world laboratory for the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, pioneered its digitized Green Pass system and became a test case for an inoculated society.
“The Green Pass project was very successful,” said Tomer Lotan, the policy chief of Israel’s national coronavirus response center, summing up the experiment of the past few months. It was particularly effective, he said, as an incentive to encourage the 16-to-40 age group to get vaccinated and to allow Israel to reopen its economy.
Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, BGU School of Public Health.
About 81 percent of Israel’s adult population has been fully vaccinated, but about 2.6 million children under 16 are still not eligible, out of a total population of just over nine million. Up to a million people have chosen not to be inoculated, despite Israel’s enviable supply of vaccine doses.
“A few months ago, if you would’ve told us we’d be in this current situation, it would probably seem like science-fiction,” said Prof. Nadav Davidovitch of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
The big question now, he said, is whether Israel has reached some degree of herd immunity. “Even if we are not there,” he said, “we are probably very close.”
Read more at The New York Times >>
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