Against the background of the government’s lack of treatment of the spread of the omicron strain in Israel, a number of experts and researchers this evening (Monday) submitted a document to government ministers warning of the possibility of severe and widespread corona disease. According to the document published tonight in Vient, the concerned experts express concern about the stability of the health system and the rate of hospitalizations that “cross the threshold of inadequacy,” along with unusually large number of children.
The experts who are considered renowned in their field – Dr. Dvir Aran, Dr. Gil Chapnik, Dr. Hila de Leon, Prof. Yaniv Erlich, Dr. Barak Raveh, Dr. Oren Caspi and Adv. Moran Leshem Bar, Writes in a presentation that prepared that unlike previous waves of the corona, this time the health system is already under unusual load due to normal winter morbidity and especially flu.
Experts claim that in a model recently presented to the Corona Cabinet, it was stated that Israel would reach a situation of about 320,000 infected per day. According to the researchers, even with the most optimistic conversion ratio according to which there will be only about two patients in a difficult condition per thousand infected, this is still the dramatic possibility of 600 critically ill patients being hospitalized in one day. “This is the first collapse point of community and hospital medical systems,” they argued.
Experts remind ministers that the health care system now has only about 700 beds left for critically ill patients after about 800 beds have already been staffed by flu patients and others, who are in moderate to critical condition. “Derived from the model presented to the cabinet that in January alone, about 5,000 critically ill patients will be hospitalized,” the researchers wrote.
At Wint, they even brought the experts’ proposal to the government to immediately implement a plan that would reduce contacts in the population by about 20%, so that the result would be a dramatic reduction in the burden on the health system – by about half. They say that as the flow of patients to the hospitals slows down, the curve will flatten and the resilience of the medical staff will not be harmed.
Dr. Barak Raveh explained that “due to the rapid rate of infection of Omicron and the lower effectiveness of vaccines against infection, the chances of stopping its spread are extremely low. But the picture that has emerged in the public and in the government is that he is invincible – not only unstoppable but, as it were, impossible to even slow down. ”
He says, “We are showing here that this is a wrong picture – more and more data from the world show that omicron spreads rapidly not because it is more contagious, but because of a particularly short time between glues – in professional language, generation time. Therefore we suggest that “Only 20% of the contacts can reduce the number of serious patients by 50%.”
Finally, members of the government wrote that at the current rate of infection, “within weeks more than 600 children are expected to be seriously ill, in addition to about 250 with MIS-C syndrome, half of whom will need intensive care. In Israel there are only about 160 intensive care beds for children, and so on. “600 children’s hospital beds.” According to the researchers, there are currently only about 20 pediatric intensive care beds available.