Israel’s Health Ministry reported 803 new cases of the coronavirus as of Sunday morning in the previous 24 hours, with the number of active patients rising to 11,189.
There are currently 335 hospitalized coronavirus patients, of whom 86 are seriously ill and 29 on ventilators. The death toll remains at 330.
“We’re in a state of emergency,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday morning regarding the increasingly rising coronavirus infection rate and rise in seriously ill patients. “This outbreak will lead to double the amount of seriously ill patients. We have to take further steps to give us more time. If we don’t halt the spread of the virus we won’t have health or economy.”
President Reuven Rivlin, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi do not have to enter quarantine despite being present at the memorial ceremony that Border Police commander Yaakov Shabtai, who tested positive for the coronavirus over the weekend, attended last week, the health ministry stated.
After Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman, MK Zvi Hauser (Derech Eretz), entered quarantine over the weekend due to contact with an intern who tested positive for the virus, two additional MKs entered quarantine on Sunday.
Public Security Minister Amir Ohana (Likud) is entering quarantine due to his contact with Border Police commander Shabtai last week.
Ohana wrote on social media that he is entering quarantine despite the fact that according to the health ministry, the nature of his contact with Shabtai does not require him to isolate, explaining that he acting out of the utmost caution.
Social Equality Minister Meirav Cohen (Blue & White) also entered quarantine on Sunday after her daughter’s gan assistant tested positive for the virus.
Meanwhile, Israel’s first MK who tested positive for the virus, Joint List MK Sami Abu Shehadeh (Balad), has not yet returned to the Knesset. He has not fully recovered from the virus although he is reportedly in good condition.
The commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Colonel “Y,” and his deputy entered quarantine on Sunday after a soldier in the unit tested positive for the coronavirus, Army Radio reported. Dozens of soldiers in the unit were also sent into quarantine.
The number of active IDF soldiers who tested positive for the coronavirus rose to over 200 over the weekend and over 5,000 soldiers are in quarantine, including Central Command Chief Maj.-Gen. Nadav Paran who tested positive for the virus last week.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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“The science behind 6 foot spacing is embarrassingly weak….The science is really not science. It’s fear based and a sort of cherry picking of certain studies. It’s very poor analysis….Because there was no evidence that you had to close all religious services and selectively open up other groups and other businesses. That’s just not the way the data was. Even the WHO recommended various other ways to deal with small spaces. And so I mean I just think that this was just again fear and ignorance driving public policy…. This is a completely irrational response. To lock down the playgrounds defies any science whatsoever…. somehow people seem to think, (people) that are in leadership positions, that it makes sense to be confined indoors rather than be out of doors. You don’t have to be a doctor to understand that that is just completely ludicrous and then when you look at the data, even the original data out of Japan, they showed that the transmission rates were far higher by order of magnitude higher inside in confined spaces. Outdoors is far, far lower risk to get a contagious disease. This is just common sense…. locking children’s playgrounds, again we go back to the fact, these are people these leaders who insist it’s all about the science but they are doing things that are contrary to the science because there is virtually no risk to the people who would use those playgrounds.”
Physician and public health expert Dr. Scott Atlas, fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, editor of the leading textbook in the field, the best‐selling Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and Spine, now in its 5th edition and officially translated from English into Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese, a Senior Advisor for Health Care to a number of candidates for President of the United States, Nominating Committee for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, named by his peers in The Best Doctors in America every year since its initial publication. Interview on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Recorded on June 18, 2020.