Israel on Wednesday logged almost 10,000 new daily coronavirus cases for the second day in a row.
The Health Ministry reported that 9,891 Israelis have tested positive for the virus out of some 150,000 tests carried out over the previous 24 hours, putting the country's infection rate at 6.69% — the highest such figure recorded since the pandemic made a resurgence in Israel.
The country's hospitals were treating 1,118 coronavirus patients, 692 of whom were hospitalized in serious condition, with 129 patients being connected to ventilators.
Of the severely ill patients aged 60 and over, 301 were vaccinated while 281 were unvaccinated, however, this age group has seen a decline in serious cases among the vaccinated in recent days as the country began offering its senior citizens a supplementary vaccine dose compared to an uptick in severe cases among those who haven't received the shot.
However, when examining each group relative to its part in the population, unvaccinated people over 60 are almost 13 times more likely to end up developing severe illness than their vaccinated counterparts.
On Tuesday, about 97,000 Israelis received their third coronavirus vaccine doses while nearly 12,000 got their first shot — the most recorded in recent weeks. About 7,300 of those dosed for the first time were younger than 19 and some 400 were older than 60.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, 6,880 Israelis have succumbed to COVID-19, 10 of them on Tuesday alone.