Former Defense Minister and Yamina Chairman Naftali Bennett attacked government handling of the coronavirus outbreak, calling it "criminal negligence."
Following the statement by coronavirus commissar Prof. Roni Gamzu that by November, Israel will reach 100,000 coronavirus tests per day, Bennett recalled that he had laid down an action plan on the issue as early as June this year.
"Criminal negligence on the part of the Netanyahu government: When you recall too late to implement what was presented to you many months ago," Bennett tweeted.
"You refused to implement a good program just because of the identity of who suggested it, his achievements, and petty politics. A program that would have prevented the suffering and anxiety of so many people," he added, "with Rwanda, Malaysia, and Georgia running things more professionally than you. Wake up!"
Earlier today, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation voted Tuesday morning to impose daily curfews on dozens of cities and towns across Israel in a bid to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
The final list of towns included in the plan was presented Tuesday, spanning 40 municipalities.
Set to begin Tuesday night and last for one week, the plan will impose curfews on the 40 towns and cities every night, from 7:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.
During the curfew, residents of the towns and cities in question will be barred from walking more than 500 meters from their homes, and most businesses will be required the close, with the exception of businesses offering ‘essential services’.
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.
Also, a new study commissioned by Revolver News concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens.
Drawing upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and weighing this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns, the results suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.