The Director General of the Ministry of Health, Prof. Nachman Ash, today (Wednesday) referred for the first time to the new subspecies of the delta that is spreading in the UK, and the first case of its kind in Israel was discovered yesterday in an 11-year-old.
"It's probably more contagious than the delta, but not significantly," Prof. Ash said in an interview here Monday.
"There will be variants all the time. Need to follow and if necessary - take special steps."
Against the background of the decline in the rate of immunization, Prof. Ash warned that if the rate of vaccines is not high enough, there is potential for a fifth wave and recurrence of the disease.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health announced this morning that 1,130 new carriers were identified in Israel yesterday, constituting 1.28 percent of the total of 91,416 tests.
This is the lowest percentage of carriers since July 10.
The number of active carriers is 16,839, with 352 hospitalized in critical condition, of whom 156 are respirators.
Here, too, the declining trend of the number of difficult patients is maintained, which is the lowest since 7 August.
The number of victims of the epidemic in Israel stands at 8,023 people, when no people died yesterday.
The coefficient of infection stands at 0.76 and is a continuous Monday with a decrease of 0.01.
The number of recipients of the booster dose stands at 3,866,248 when 9,110 people received the third vaccine yesterday.
1,158 received the second vaccine dose and 2,156 the first.
In fact, the overall slowdown in receiving the vaccine in Israel continues, with the total number of vaccine recipients each day in the last two weeks standing at around 12,000 people.
