Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, Head of Israel's public health services, explains that Israel is now at the phase of the pandemic when the country must learn to live with and manage COVID-19.
“We’re getting to the phase of the pandemic when we have an infection rate that comes a bit up or down and we need to monitor it,” Alroy-Preis tells Israel National News. “But this is living with corona. I don’t think we need to continue counting the waves and unless we get a very dangerous variant coming in this is how it would look like. Up and down and we’re monitoring and continuing to live with it.”
Looking back at the last two years, she thinks that Israel rose to the challenge of dealing with the pandemic.
“We are managing COVID-19 right now with a combination of some guards that are left, like the PCR testing at the airport that we continue to keep even though some countries have started to let go of this practice. But on the other hand inside Israel, everything is open, schools, economy, everything is regular, and we use vaccines and we use medications to try to make sure that people who are infected are not deteriorating into severe and critical disease.”
“So we're using all the tools that we have in our toolbox in order to make sure that we are managing COVID-19 and continue with our lives," she adds.
Regarding the current polio outbreak in Israel, Alroy-Preis describes the situation as “pretty serious.”
“We haven’t seen a polio case since 1988 and we have been without polio for many years and now we are seeing this outbreak,” she says. “What we need to do right now is make sure that all our kids are vaccinated and we are in a national campaign to catch up all the vaccinations of kids and make sure that they’re protected and their surroundings are protected.”