Professor Dror Mevorach, head of the coronavirus ward at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center, told Israel Hayom that in his estimation, the peak of the Omicron wave of COVID-19 will last another two or three weeks.
"The battle is still in full force, and the ones feeling the burden are the hospitals and medical clinics," Prof. Mevorach told Israel Hayom. "It's if there were difficult battles in the Golan Heights and in southern Israel, and the people on the Home Front said that the war was over. Coronavirus is still here, and it exists and is ongoing."
Regarding his own hospital, Prof. Mevorach said, "We never had something like this until now. In the third wave, when we had the most hospitalizations, Hadassah had six wards. Today there are about 150 people hospitalized in all the wards. But they come and go with much greater frequency than in the past."
"In the past two years, we at Hadassah have treated nearly 7,000 coronavirus patients, 1,500 of them in the past month alone. This week we will break the record of 1,200 serious cases. It's true that Omicron is milder, but when there are many people infected, the number of serious cases also rises."
When asked if he believes coronavirus will disappear, he said, "I am very optimistic. Take Spanish flu, which infected one-third of the world's population and disappeared after three years. SARS as well disappeared 17 years ago, after less than one year - and no one understood how."
"I don't know how long we'll have to live like this, and anyone who is prophesying doesn't know what he's talking about. We have good medications and vaccines. It could be that a variant will arrive that is very deadly, and that will change the rules of the game. But we have ways to fight it. I'm less concerned."