Former Health Ministry Director General Professor Yoram Lass on Tuesday morning slammed the Health Ministry guidelines for preventing the spread of coronavirus.
In an interview with Channel 12, Lass said, "I'm going to say something that's really hard to hear. For the sake of a few people who anyways don't have a long life expectancy, you don't ruin a country. You don't ruin the world. You sacrifice [those people]."
"In the hospitals there are a million people hospitalized, and 5,000 of the million will die due to infection. That's very dangerous. Its much more dangerous to die from infection in a hospital than from coronavirus. So you're not going to go to the hospital? Normal people take risks, and certainly leaders [do]. The only thing that's left is crazy Donald Trump. He said that last year 37,000 Americans died of flu and nothing happened, life went on. Now 22 people died [of corona], not 37,000. (Ed. the actual number is 61,000 last year.)Think about it.
"The wild media is exaggerating the issue and it's driving governments crazy. Governments are afraid of the public, the public is afraid of the governments, they feed off each other. Every time you see another crazy thing. You've gone crazy. In Italy there are 60 million people who haven't yet died, only a few people died, like flu. I'm completely calm, it's flu. Coronavirus is a light illness and the chance of dying from it is almost zero."
In fact, in just over three months - since December 2019 - coronavirus has killed over 4,000 people globally.
Dr. Asher Salmon, who runs the Health Ministry's International Department, slammed Lass for his statements, saying: "I want to balance things out. The hysteria is not good, but neither is complacence."
"Someone will understand you in a way that will endanger the public health. This is not flu, there is a similarity in symptoms and it's true that most people have it lightly, but when [coronavirus] gets bad it's a very serious disease."