The Health Ministry has authorized HMOs to begin extending its coronavirus testing to include those who are not in quarantine and who had not previously met criteria for testing such as return from abroad or contact with a confirmed case.
The tests will be carried out at specially designated sites for those who develop symptoms that may indicate the presence of the disease.
The clinics have been set up over the past week to examine those with fever and respiratory symptoms such as sore throat, shortness of breath or cough.
The clinics are subject to special measures aimed at preventing the exposure of other patients to the virus.
Visists to the clinics will be done independently or through a doctor's referral obtained via online services.
The clinics are to be open across the country, and doctors will be able to take a sample with Health Ministry approval.
It is thought that the samples will help locate thousands of coronavirus patients who may be infected and need to be isolated.
The clinics, nicknamed "sentinel clinics," will also sporadically submit their samples to a national database that tracks "outbreak clusters" in various locations.
The Health Ministry said Thursday that Israel's total number of coronavirus patients has reached 529.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Health Ministry DG discuss efforts to clamp down on coronavirus
(Photo: Shalev Shalom )
"We will reach a situation in which there are many hundreds of new patients each day, and possibly more," Moshe Bar-Siman-Tov, director-general of the Health Ministry, told Army Radio on Wednesday.
The Mossad spy agency said Thursday that it had managed to obtain 100,000 testing kits for coronavirus. The Health Ministry said however that the kits were missing the vital swabs needed to carry out the tests,