Bennett Warns of Major Outbreak of "Omicron" in Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned that Israel "is on the verge of unprecedented infection rates with the Coronavirus (known also as COVID-19 ) because of an outbreak of the "Omicron" mutant on a scale that Israel has never seen before."

On the possibility of imposing the closure, Bennett said the goal of his government since the beginning of the pandemic has been to avoid the closure as much as possible.

He revealed that he had received a great deal of criticism in this area, but the government doesn’t know what the situation would be like later if the number of infections increased, especially the capacity of hospitals to treat them."

He refused to make a promise not to impose closure.

He pointed out that “according to the quarantine policy that the government is expected to adopt, vaccinated people will not be required to enter the quarantine even if they come into contact with a verified patient.”

Bennett noted that “the data of children’s admissions to hospitals in the world due to the spread of the Omicron mutant is increasing."

The Israeli PM called on parents to vaccinate their children, stressing that the anti-Corona vaccines are safe and effective.

He warned that "the Omicron mutant is completely different from what the world knew about the strains of Corona previously, as it is highly contagious."

Data from the Israeli Ministry of Health showed that the number of Coronavirus cases in the country is rising at an unprecedented rate.

2,952 new cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed during the past 24 hours, which is a record number and the highest in the past months.

Israel had recorded 1,799 new cases the day before, and only 1,329 cases before it.

However, Professor Eran Segal, a biologist from the Weizmann Institute of Science, said that the doubling rate of COVID-19 infections in Israel is about every two or three days, which means that the country should expect cases to rise quickly.

It is not clear how many of these cases are Omicron, but Segal said he expects that about 60 percent of infections in Israel are actually people with Omicron.