Despite the high number of cases of COVID-19 and the situation in the hospitals, at this point the Coronavirus Cabinet is not expected to convene until next Wednesday, when Prime Minister Naftali Bennett returns from New York, where he will take part in the UN General Assembly, Kan 11 News reported on Thursday.
Most cabinet ministers oppose further restrictions, with the exception of Minister Ze'ev Elkin, who has long thought that the restrictions should be tightened.
Aides to the Prime Minister believe that the rate of new cases may change after the vaccine certificates expire next weekend for those who are six months past the second dose of the vaccine and have not yet been vaccinated in the third dose, which will lead to a wave of people receiving booster shots.
Meanwhile, the expert cabinet advising the Health Ministry on the coronavirus has called for a change in the government's response to the pandemic at the present time and to tighten restrictions.
"The government has opted for an intermediate option - a 'containment' policy for an indefinite period of time with almost no major effort to curb and reduce infections, and in the event that the threshold of seriously ill patients is reached, a return to containment efforts," the experts determined.
"As we warned in advance, a long series of critical braking tools (tools focused on the infected and their environment such as epidemiological investigation, early detection, careful isolation and enforcement) are no longer applicable at the stage where there are between 8,000 and 10,000 patients per day, the braking systems are not up to the task now - and the range of options is reduced to the family of non-selective tools, which by their nature are more detrimental to the economy and less acceptable to the public."
The experts noted that the Ministry of Health must prepare for the possibility that returning to school after the holidays will bring with it a further increase in morbidity, all while there is no "braking distance" left in the health system, so that a further increase in morbidity may have a heavy price in the number of deaths.