So how can one sum up another year of the corona plague in Israel?
We started in Black January: 1,500 died on the one hand, and vaccines on the other.
It took some time, but in the end they worked superbly: without restrictions, and with a sense of victory over the corona and euphoria in the air.
And in April - zero deaths, for the first time in ten months.
But then came June, and the Israelis, the first in the world to get vaccinated, had to find out firsthand that the effectiveness of the second dose decreases after a certain period, and that a booster vaccine is needed.
It has cost us a lot of patients and quite a few deaths.
We went on a booster vaccination campaign.
A significant number of the vaccinated (800,000 people, as of today), mostly young people, did not continue to the third dose - and despite this, we seemingly managed to beat the corona again.
A woman is vaccinated with the booster dose,
Of course, this time we were already more skeptical.
If the first vaccination operation was similar to the Six Day War, the booster operation was already the Yom Kippur War.
"Delta trauma," I call it;
Everyone's fear that a new variant will emerge and devour the cards.
We shuffled around with about 500 verified for November, until a new breed suddenly burst into our lives: the omicron.
Personally, at first I thought it was another variant that was panicking the world, a kind of feeling like in March 2020, but as the days went by I realized: this is a real "game changer".
In South Africa, the first in which people became infected with the new strain, a severe wave of illness began that was characterized by an alarmingly rapid increase in the number of verified.
And when the first lab results of the trials of the vaccine against the omicron arrived, they were not encouraging.
It was followed by an invasion of Britain, Denmark, France and other countries.
The situation seems alarming, to say the least, and world infection records are breaking.
Slightly late, the omicron came to us as well.
His first steps here do not bode well.
The morbidity is soaring at a tremendous rate, and probably here too, infection records will be broken.
Thanks to the vaccines: fewer hospitalizations
But - yes, there is a but!
- Despite the dizzying speed at which the omicron spreads, we see fewer hospitalizations and fewer deaths.
It is not clear whether this is a less violent strain than its predecessors, or whether the level of immunity (among both vaccinated and recovering people) affects its ability to infect.
In Israel, and around the world, the numbers are being faithfully monitored to try to understand.
The initial information that has arrived is that although the omicron "bypasses" the vaccines and reduces their ability to prevent infection, it apparently does not significantly impair their effectiveness against a serious illness.
Corona Department at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Photo: Oren Ben Hakon (Archive)
Israel has been in the wave of the omicron for several weeks.
This week I dared to check for the first time what the condition of our serious illness is, in relation to the number of infections.
For now, the booster vaccines seem to be holding up and helping prevent serious illness.
The results in the field are good.
It's too early to make statements, but the current figures give me hope that we will get through this wave, as we went through the four that preceded it.
I wish we had not been deceived.
What next?
It is very difficult to determine.
The corona taught us that she knows how to surprise.
I will end with a quote from Bill Gates, who this week turned to the world and tried to assess when we could actually say we defeated the virus.
"I believe," he said, "that if we take the right steps, it will be possible to end the epidemic by 2022."
He did not explain why, but I can assume he meant that the Omicron's exceptional infectivity, along with vaccines specifically tailored to the new strain to be developed later, would probably bring the world to the same herd immunity we're all waiting for.
And so, a year that began in Alpha and moved to Delta, ends in Omicron.
I wish for myself, and for all of us, to open my concluding column next year with the words: "Bill Gates was right, the plague is behind us."
If we adhere to the guidelines, and if the rate of vaccinators goes up, it is not a legend.
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
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