Health Ministry closes hotline for reporting quarantine violations

The Health Ministry has dismantled its team for supervising quarantines and verifying that those who need to isolate are doing so, and shut the hotline it operated for citizens to report individuals who had violated their restrictions, the ministry confirmed.

The closure was due to manpower constraints, the Kan public broadcaster reported Tuesday evening.

The squad consisted of nine inspectors and 10 police officers who had acted on information received via the special phone number and website. The report said the team had been successful, catching hundreds of people who violated the terms of their quarantine.

However, Health Ministry Director-General Chezy Levy instructed them to stop immediately and go back to their previous work , the report said.

The ministry was said to have confirmed the news, with a spokesperson arguing that it isn’t the ministry’s job to deal with enforcement and “policing” and that the ministry is short on manpower.

Israel Police sources were quoted fuming at the development, saying that it would harm enforcement since the team had a key role in communicating violations to the police.

The government late on Tuesday approved a one-week extension of a law that heavily restricts demonstrations and indoor prayers during the ongoing virus lockdown. The law was approved by the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee last week and went into effect at midnight Thursday.

It was initially set to remain in force until Wednesday, and will now be in place until at least October 13.  Officials say the lockdown is among the only ways to keep infection rates in check without a robust contact tracing system in place.

Ministers were told Tuesday night that the number of contact tracers in Israel now stood at 1,300, with each able to carry out an average of two investigations per day, putting the government’s investigatory capacity far below the number of new daily infections, according to Channel 12 news.

The share of coronavirus tests coming back positive fell to its lowest level in weeks on Tuesday, Health Ministry figures showed Wednesday morning, the latest positive sign that Israel’s efforts to curb runaway infection numbers were bearing fruit.

The ministry said that 4,682 new coronavirus cases had been confirmed Tuesday, out of 44,696 tests. The 10.5 percent positive rate was the lowest since September 19, the day after the start of a nationwide lockdown. Israel had seen the percentage rise as high as 15.1% in late September before the trend began to reverse.

The positivity rate is seen as a key metric for measuring the spread of the virus, given uneven day-to-day testing numbers. During the first wave of the virus, the country rarely saw a positivity rate of more than 3%, though reporting at the time was intermittent.

The total number of confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic rose to 278,932 Wednesday, including 61,927 active cases — a figure that has also steadily declined in recent days.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday there was reason for “cautious optimism” that Israel was on the way out of its raging second virus wave, but said that despite the positive signs, he would not be rushing to lift the nationwide lockdown.

Despite the positive signs, deaths have continued to rack up, and hospitals are still dealing with over 800 seriously ill patients.

Nine new deaths from the disease since Tuesday night brought the toll since the start of the pandemic to 1,806. Health Ministry figures showed that there had been 46 fatalities between 7 a.m. Tuesday and 7 a.m. Wednesday, among the highest single-day tolls recorded.

According to the ministry, 879 patients were in serious condition, including 240 on ventilators. Another 304 were in moderate condition and the rest had mild or no symptoms.

Israel’s coronavirus czar, Ronni Gamzu, said in a Tuesday afternoon press conference that it was too early to tell if the new figures represented a significant trend.

Health officials have indicated that infection numbers must drop to 2,000 daily cases before the lockdown can be lifted.

The lockdown rules, under a government-declared “special coronavirus emergency,” bar Israelis from traveling more than a kilometer from their homes except for certain essential purposes.

The law also bans indoor prayers at synagogues and visiting others’ sukkahs over the week-long Sukkot holiday, which began on Friday night.