Ran Balicer, chairman of Israel’s national expert panel on COVID-19, told the AFP that the COVID Delta variant’s emergence as the “dominant strain” in the country has led to a “massive shift in the transmission dynamic.”
Vaccinations with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine originally brought down COVID cases to five a day, but now the number of infections have risen to around 300 in recent days, with the Delta variant ripping through the small country.
Balicer said half of the daily cases are among children, while some remaining cases are vaccinated adults.:
To some extent that could be expected since 85 percent of Israeli adults are vaccinated. But the rates in which we see these breakthrough cases make some believe they extend beyond that expected point and suggest some decrease in vaccine effectiveness against mild illness—but not severe illness—is likely.
Balicer added it was also too early to draw conclusions about the vaccine’s effectiveness against serious illness caused by the Delta variant.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned on July 4 that certain restrictions may have to return “with the Delta variant running amok.”
In the U.S. where only 55 percent are vaccinated, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, told NBC News that a return to masks indoors, even for vaccinated people, may be appropriate in areas with low numbers of vaccinated people:
If you’re in a community that has a high amount of disease and less than a third of your population is vaccinated, one should consider whether the policy should be to mask. [Masking is] more about protecting the two-thirds of the community that are not vaccinated.
(Sources: AFP via The Times of Israel, NBC News)