Health Ministry Spokesman Eyal Besson says a person who tested coronavirus positive returned from Istanbul, Turkey to Israel.
The carrier returned on a Pegasus flight, number PC779 on August 31st, 2020 from Istanbul-to Tel Aviv, departure at 22:45, landing at 23:50.
The Health Ministry asks passengers who were on the flight to enter isolation until September 14th, 2020 according to guidelines published on the Health Ministry website.
The Health Ministry yesterday reported 3,392 positive coronavirus tests on Monday. However, there is a good chance a number of these tests may be inaccurate. Furthermore, 80% or more will be asymptomatic, and a much smaller percentage of those remaining cases will require hospitalization.
A positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test does not necessarily mean the virus is present, infectious, or viable, and the PCR test does not detect the whole virus.
In an article entitled Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be, the New York Times recently wrote: "The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.
"This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.
"In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found."
Also, a study conducted by researchers at UCLA and Stanford University found the chances of contracting or dying from coronavirus much lower than previously thought, with the chances of dying from COVID-19 for an average 50-64-year-old at 1 in 19.1 million.
A recent Freedom of Information Act request to the Heath Ministry sought to determine various details regarding the PCR tests in use in Israel, including how many positive tests reported so far reflect repeat tests for those people, of all the people who performed two tests in a row (ie. - within 24 hours), in how many tests were the two results different, whether there is a uniform standard for setting a viral threshold for a positive coronavirus test, and if so, what it is, how many of the tests are borderline and whether a borderline test is considered positive, what was the diagnosis for someone whose test was defined as borderline, and what was the percentage of people claimed infected in the context of the epidemiological investigations defined as borderline or asymptomatic.
