Faced with a level of Covid-19 contamination considered worrying, Israel is preparing, Sunday, December 27, to begin a third quasi-general containment of at least two weeks.
Containment measures must come into effect from 5 p.m. (3 p.m. GMT) for a period of two weeks which could be extended to a month if the number of daily contaminations remains above the 1,000 mark.
Israelis will not be able to travel more than a kilometer from their homes and most businesses will be closed except for deliveries.
Professional sectors that do not receive the public must keep only 50% of their staff in their premises.
However, it will be possible to get vaccinated and the school system will partially function.
Travelers returning from abroad must already - with some exceptions - pass their quarantine in hotels designated by the authorities.
"We will be able to get out of the coronavirus in 30 days"
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the national vaccination campaign "unprecedented in the world" launched last week aimed to immunize in one month a quarter of the population of Israel - 9 million people - , at the rate of 150,000 people per day.
"As soon as this is achieved, we will be able, in 30 days, to get out of the coronavirus and reopen the economy," he said.
More than 400,000 cases including 3,210 deaths have been recorded in Israel.
After a first containment in the spring, the authorities had imposed a second in September when the country recorded one of the highest infection rates per capita in the world.
After a drop, the number of new infections has started to rise again, with more than 3,000 new cases every day in recent days.
Restrictive measures in several countries
The rapid vaccinations and the restrictions "will allow us to emerge the first in the world" from the pandemic, predicted Benyamin Netanyahu, in the election campaign after the dissolution this week of the Parliament.
His calculation suggests an end to the crisis in early March, just before the new national elections scheduled for the 23rd.
Several countries are again subject to restrictive measures, such as Austria, which confined its population on Saturday, until January 24.
Italy and Ireland had re-confined before Christmas, and local lockdowns or severe restrictions affect millions of people in the UK.
Japan, for its part, decided to put an end to all new arrivals of non-resident foreigners on its soil from Monday until the end of January.
With AFP
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