Israeli authorities have started conducting serological tests on 100,000 of their citizens, one of the largest screening campaigns in the world, to prevent a " second wave " of Covid-19 disease, a senior official said Thursday.
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These tests aim to measure the " collective immunity " of the Israeli population and to determine the people most likely to be affected in the event of a new wave of contamination. " We have started (...) and it should not take too long before we can identify interesting trends ," Dr Yair Schindle, a senior task force official, told AFP on Thursday. set up by the Israeli government to manage the end of the pandemic.
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At the same time, the authorities are also carrying out tests on specific groups in " risk areas " - notably in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, the main incubators of the crisis in Israel - and among medical personnel who have treated infected people. by the new coronavirus. " We are trying to find out (by these tests) how many of these people have been exposed to the virus and how many have developed antibodies, " said Dr. Schindle, also co-founder of aMoon, an Israeli venture capital fund specializing in up biomedical.
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The question of immunity is still debated, the World Health Organization (WHO) having estimated at the end of April that there was " no evidence " that people already infected and cured are protected against a new infection. If the authorities have accelerated deconfinement in recent weeks, they are nevertheless preparing for a potential " second wave " of contamination this winter or even before.
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In total, they bought 2.5 million kits for these tests. They will be carried out by the four health insurance funds offering health care to the entire population, in order to facilitate the gathering of these epidemiological data, according to Dr. Schindle. It is the largest national survey in the world, he says. A country of around nine million people, Israel has recorded more than 16,800 cases of coronavirus, including 281 deaths, but with a low death rate (31 per million inhabitants) compared to other countries.
