The Health Ministry announced on Friday an agreement reached with the Weizmann Institute to analyze up to 1,000 tests for coronavirus a day.
The announcement comes after what has been seen as a lack of transparency on the part of the ministry regarding testing.
The National Security Council reported that the number of tests conducted on any given day has dropped from nearly 10,000 last Friday to only 4,412 on Thursday. The drop has been attributed to shortages of material for testing and analyzing results.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had set the target of 10,000 tests to be conducted each day as the first step in his effort to reach 30,000 people tested daily.
The Health Ministry announced Thursday it will conduct 3,000 COVID-19 tests in retirement homes throughout the country within the next 24 hours and will maintain a similar testing capacity in the coming days.
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Mishan nursing home in Beersheba, where eleven tenants have died of coronavirus
(Photo: Chaim Horenstein)
The national emergency service “Magen David Adom and the Health Ministry have begun today and will continue in the next few days to conduct tests in retirement homes where confirmed patients were identified,” the ministry said in a statement.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, 24 citizens from assisted living residences died in Israel after contracting the novel coronavirus. Almost half of them, eleven COVID-19 patients, have all been infected at the same nursing home in Beersheba.
Meanwhile, an Air Force aircraft, carrying about five tonnes of a drug tested as an experimental treatment for coronavirus, landed on Thursday from India.
The material substances can be formed into hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) and chloroquine, decades-old drugs used to treat malaria.
According to a New York Times report, at the beginning of April, the drug hydroxychloroquine already showed promising results in preliminary clinical trials - albeit on a small group of 62 patients only displaying mild symptoms.
The Indian government banned the export of the drug, but Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi allowed to make an exception to the rule after he spoke to his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
New Delhi emphasized its strategic relationship with Jerusalem as the reason for the gesture.
Prof. Cyrille Cohen, head of the immunotherapy laboratory and vice dean of the life sciences faculty at Bar-Ilan University, said he believes Israel’s COVID-19 testing capability is “quite good” compared to other locales.
“We’re doing a lot of tests, especially compared to other countries, like in Europe,” Cohen told to The Media Line. “We’ve reached 7,000 tests daily, which is a very good capability right now, and we’re trying to expand that. There are other countries that are not performing enough tests, so there are a lot of people who are not identified as carriers.”
Overall, Cohen believes the curve showing the coronavirus-infection trend in Israel is “not that bad” – though it could be better.
“In Italy, when they were at the same point as we are, more or less a month after the beginning of the infection, they already had 10 times more deaths than we do in Israel,” he said. “So we’re doing something right.”
Despite his cautious optimism, Cohen says there has been a “race against time” to prevent medical systems and hospitals from becoming overwhelmed with critically ill patients, and that it was too soon to tell how successful Israel would be in this regard.
First published: 17:04, 04.10.20