Does anyone have knowledge about the situation in Israel?

[Sadik]

Obviously they've made spectacular progress on vaccinating the population. I realise vaccines aren't 100% effective, but the evidence we're seeing in the UK would suggest that deaths per 100,000 would be plummeting, and case rates falling if not as fast.

As I understand it, the country has also had fairly stringent lockdowns, so that's not the issue. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has actual knowledge of the situation as to possible explanations. (For context, I'm thrilled that my dad has had his vaccine, and optimistically waiting to be called myself, I'm not a sceptic.)

not sure what your actual question is but you could try reading the local press to follow what is going on there?
www.timesofisrael.com/restaurants-fully-booked-as-israelis-flock-back-after-year-of-restrictions/

I think scientists are still cautious. It's not over yet.

www.jpost.com/health-science/is-the-covid-19-pandemic-really-over-for-israel-661739

I have been reading the local press, but the articles I've found talking about figures generally refer - quite unsurprisingly & reasonably - to changes within Israel, rather than comparing trends internationally.

The articles regarding re-opening are very recent (actually they're where I got the impression that there had been strict lockdown up until now) and wouldn't have fed through into figures as yet.

To try to clarify, time4 I think I"m asking two separate questions.

• Why are death rates not falling faster in Israel than in other countries? The initial evidence in the UK (eg from Scotland) appears to show death rates falling faster amongst the first vaccinated groups - specifically in the graphs I've seen over 80s - as compared to unvaccinated groups. Therefore by extension one might expect death rates to show a sharper downwards trend in Israel.
• Are there any articles that I haven't found comparing trends in case rates in Israel to other countries? Or between population groups in Israel?

tbh, the people trying to track vaccine effectiveness in UK are also disappointed that cases/deaths here haven't declined as fast as it seemed like they could have done. I'm not really one of those people, they just copy me on emails.

The decline in deaths in UK has been much faster in last month than it was in spring 2020; this is a strong sign the vaccine is doing good, especially when broken down by age bands.

The most popular explanations in UK why not declining faster are:
*40% of age 80+ people admit to less social distancing in the period < 2 weeks after their jab. That's what they admit to. Before the vaccine can protect them.

*The vaccine is less effective in people age 70+ than hoped for

*People who get symptoms from covid in the first few days after jab but think it's just side effects so take no precautions, in meantime spread covid to their contacts.

Interaction effects of above and other aspects. So any/all of that in Israel may be happening. There's a lot of vaccine hesitancy in Israel, too, especially among communities with the largest families/most insular social contact. Much more than in UK so far.

That's really interesting @MedSchoolRat, thank-you. It suggests that although the effects might not be showing up as fast as hoped, they'll work their way through in time, I guess.

I follow Eran Segal on Twitter who tracks the Israeli stats. He doubles up his tweets so that his English speaking followers can also read them, which is much appreciated.

The vaccine effect was there but I think it took two weeks longer than expected to kick in.

The population in Israel is younger than the UK. I’m not sure how they compare to other countries though.

I don’t understand those graphs you have linked - they seem to have a weird scale and I expect are deliberately misleading

If you look at the graphs here you will see there has been a steep drop in both cases and deaths: www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/

It’s also worth noting that Israel tended to lockdown early and hard compared to UK, so park was never as bad as it got here

They're from the FT tracker Trumpety - I screenshotted them so that may have messed things up. Not sure if a link will pick up the country selections

Changing the scale from log to linear makes a difference in how the data are shown

For sure, but I wasn't sure it made a major difference to the overall picture

Interesting, thanks. I’m going to have a play with those graphs

@Trumpety

It’s also worth noting that Israel tended to lockdown early and hard compared to UK, so park was never as bad as it got here

there were very high infection rates at one point though before the 2nd lockdown in September, some of the highest case rates in the world at the time

I read that Israel has had trouble with low lockdown compliance.

There's a very positive article here - not sure if it'll link through (maybe paywalled) but essentially saying lockdown is over, though there is a tail of infections largely linked to vaccine sceptics.

"Without overtly declaring it, the government’s policy has largely been to keep an eye on hospital admissions instead of overall new infections — if the young catch coronavirus because they didn’t take the vaccine, but stay out of hospitals, it’s an outcome the state can live with."

Which sounds totally fair enough to me!

A large portion of Israel’s community are Orthodox Jew who tend to do their own thing, I believe there was low lockdown compliance in that demographic. They were the community hit hardest by Covid in Israel. The vaccine take up with Orthodox Jews has been quite high though, in the 70% area. I wonder if that skews Israel’s numbers a bit.

To explain that better, Orthodox Jews were generally ignoring lockdown and were therefore the cause of a disproportionately large number of cases compared to other demographics in Israel. But 72% (just checked) having gotten the vaccine has therefore brought the Orthodox Jewish Covid rates down to less than the nations average.