Serological testing set to begin in Bnei Brak ahead of nationwide survey
Pilot program to take place in badly hit city ahead of widespread blood tests amid concerns of a second wave of coronavirus infections
The Health Ministry was on Monday preparing to start serological testing in the virus-stricken city of Bnei Brak as a pilot ahead of a nationwide testing campaign to determine the population’s readiness for a possible second wave of COVID-19.
According to a draft of the proposal published by the Ynet news site, the plan has received the go-ahead from influential leader Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky. The country’s HMOs will participate in the project, as will the Gertner Research Institute, which carried out the epidemiological study in Bnei Brak that was used to determine whether daycares, kindergartens and schools could reopen.
Dr. Boaz Lev, head of the coronavirus treatment team at the Health Ministry, which is in charge of the pilot, told Ynet that the plan was to carry out 3,000 tests per day to create a “situation map” of how many citizens have encountered the coronavirus.
“The serological tests don’t really show what is going on right now,” he said. “The tests [instead] show how many people have already encountered the virus and developed antibodies. If I got sick two or three months ago and developed antibodies, we can see that.”
The serological pilot program will focus on three groups: families where there was a verified patient, symptom-free families living in a building where a verified patient lives, and random selection of families and individuals in the city.
At the beginning of April, Bnei Brak was the first city placed under a strict lockdown, with residents only allowed to leave municipal boundaries to work in key industries or to receive medical care.
According to the report, it has not yet been decided if the testing will take place at the HMOs or in the homes of those chosen as part of the sample.
The report came after Health Ministry director general Moshe Bar Siman-Tov gave an interview with The New York Times in which he said that 100,000 serological tests, obtained from firms in the United States and Italy for almost $40 million, were being prepared for use by health clinics across the country in the coming weeks.
The government hopes that by conducting such widespread testing, it will be able to determine if Israel is approaching herd immunity or if it is unprepared for a resurgence of the virus. The testing will be conducted across the country but there will be a special focus on cities that have experienced high rates of infection, such as Jerusalem.
“This is the most important mission: Get ready for the next wave, especially a wave during wintertime. Luckily, the COVID-19 caught us post-influenza season. But we can’t assume that there’s not going to be a next wave or that it will be during summertime,” Bar Siman-Tov told The Times.
He said that if only a small percentage of Israelis were found to have COVID-19 antibodies, that could indicate the country’s health system may become swamped during a future outbreak.
According to the Haaretz daily, which originally reported on the Bnei Brak pilot program, Bar Siman-Tov’s deputy, Itamar Grotto, told the Knesset coronavirus committee last week that “the serological tests cannot be used for individual treatment purposes because we still don’t know whether someone who develops antibodies has recovered from the illness and whether they are no longer contagious.”
“The tests will mainly be used to survey public exposure, whether among children or adults,” he explained. “That will help us track the prevalence of the disease. These tests will enable us to locate those who were infected but didn’t develop symptoms, and in this way, we can get a better picture.”
Health experts around the world have regarded antibody tests as an acceptable means of determining lockdown policies and useful for monitoring purposes, even though the World Health Organization (WHO) hasn’t yet declared that antibodies necessarily mean their carrier has immunity from reinfection.
Despite many reports of reinfections — including at least two cases in Israel — and the WHO saying last month that there was no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected against a second infection, most experts say those reports are likely due to problems with coronavirus tests.
Some experts around the world, including a senior official at the World Health Organization, have argued that reports of reinfected patients have been false positives, with the tests picking up on dead virus fragments.
Dr. Yair Schindel, a member of the Health Ministry’s COVID-19 task force, told The Times that he believed Israel’s upcoming nationwide testing push could help “to answer the questions the WHO is raising.”
Agencies contributed to this report.
