In addition, the Ministry of Health invited Ashkelon residents for testing after traces of the delta variant were found in the city’s wastewater.
“Our recommendation is to start wearing masks already indoors,” said coronavirus commissioner Prof. Nachman Ash said. “Next week, it will be mandatory.”
Earlier in the week, the government announced that it would reinstate the obligation to wear masks in closed spaces if the weekly average of daily cases exceeded 100. Till Thursday morning, the figure stood at 75, up from 58 the previous day and 45 on Tuesday.
Some 138 new cases were identified on Wednesday, and as of 11 p.m. on Thursday, the new virus carriers registered were already 183, the most since April. Last week, new daily cases varied between three and 46.
While Israel has recorded more than 100 cases for several days in a row, the figures are only a fraction of the number of new patients identified every day during the darkest months of the pandemic, in the winter.
As of Thursday, 330 children and 30 teachers were positive for the virus, of whom a few thousand were in isolation.
The overall number of active cases stood at 789 after coming down from 200 in recent weeks. At the peak of the pandemic, 88,000 people were infected.
Ashkelon residents were asked to get tested for the coronavirus if they were experiencing any symptoms, such as fever or cough, after traces of the delta variant were found in the city’s wastewater, the health ministry said.
According to the lab’s head, Dr. Itay Bar-Or, the health ministry’s national laboratory for environmental virology has been surveying the city’s sewage since around February as part of an early detection project.
He told The Jerusalem Post that traces of the virus in sewage stunned the ministry and raised concerns that residents of the city have been infected with the virus, despite there being no confirmed cases yet.
“There are no known asymptomatic or symptomatic cases in Ashkelon and yet we still found traces of the virus in sewage, so it suggests that there are people who have had the virus,” Bar-Or explained. He said that he is hopeful that the cases will increase after people are investigated.
The ministry’s program has been monitoring Israel as a whole for the past year, but Bar-Or said he was not at liberty to say whether the delta variant was identified in other cities of late.
He said that the lab has recommended increased surveillance in view of the situation in Ashkelon.
This is not the first time that the health ministry has been diagnosed with contamination from dirty water. In March, the Ministry of Health reported an Israeli coronavirus mutation that had been discovered through a sewage sequencing project late last year, first in Rahat and then in Netanya and Haifa.
In recent days, there has also been a slight increase in the number of serious patients, the lowest since last summer, to 21 on Saturday, 27 on Thursday. In January, however, severe cases stood at over 1,200.
“We see almost no serious morbidity,” Chezzi Levy, director general of the Ministry of Health, told Channel 12. If we do, we will consider additional restrictions.
Meanwhile, the vaccination campaign is slowly gaining momentum. On Wednesday, more than 10,000 shots were fired for the first time in two months. Of those, about 7,000 children aged 12-15 were given the first dose, marking another significant increase from the previous day, when about 4,100 adolescents were vaccinated, and by Monday, when it was The number was 2,600.
The government has indicated that vaccination of the 12-15 age group is one of the priorities to prevent new outbreaks.
As announced earlier in the week by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Ashe said that all vaccines Israel currently has are due to expire at the end of July. While Israel is working to get new doses to make sure it also has vaccines in August, this has not been confirmed.
The government is working on several fronts to prevent a new surge in cases.
The obligation to wear masks at airports and in medical facilities has already been reinstated, and enforcement of rules, including quarantine requirements for people returning from abroad, has been intensified. Aish said additional technical devices, including electronic bracelets, for those entering the quarantine are being considered and recommendations will be made to the government.
In addition, Bennett announced on Wednesday that the entry of vaccinated foreign nationals, which was to be allowed from July 1, was postponed until August 1.
Some 11 of the new cases identified on Wednesday came from abroad, seven of whom were fully vaccinated. Overall, nearly half of the virus carriers identified last month were vaccinated. However, according to Ash, this should not come as a surprise.
“Israel has a high number of vaccinated people, so it is normal that we see vaccinated people getting infected. It says nothing about the effectiveness of the vaccine,” he said. “We know the vaccine is not 100% effective, but a percentage less than that.”
“The data we have today is accumulated from research we are doing in the laboratory, and including data from places where the Indian version, Delta, has replaced the British version as the generic version, making our vaccine very effective. points to being, about 90%, in preventing the coronavirus disease, COVID-19,” Alon Rapaport, Pfizer’s medical director in Israel, told local broadcaster Army Radio earlier in the day.
According to KAN, the new coronavirus cabinet will convene for its first meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday night.
Reuters contributed to this report.