COVID-19 morbidity and mortality in Israel

Abstract

Introduction. The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was identified as the causative agent for a series of atypical respiratory diseases in the Hubei Province of Wuhan, China in December of 2019. The disease SARS-CoV-2, termed COVID-19, was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. In Israel the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was reported on 21 February 2020 and the first death - on 20 March 2020. The first emergency restrictions were put in place by March 2020. Purpose. To analyze the of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality in Israeli population during the pandemic. Material and methods. Data on COVID-19 morbidity and mortality were retrieved from the Ministry of Health of Israel and WHO databases, and officially published reports and scientific articles in English and Hebrew. Results. COVID-19 data suggest that about half (4.6 million) of the nearly 8.9 million of Israeli population had a confirmed COVID-19 infection over the six waves of outbreak (Fig. 1). The highest mortality rate was registered during the third (10.87 new deaths per million, January 2021) and fifth (13.88 new deaths per million, February 2022) waves of the outbreak. Case-fatality rate of COVID-19 was the highest (1.69%) in the earliest stage (May-June 2020) of the outbreak, and declined as treatment improved and response changed, reaching 0.26% in May 2022. Vaccination started in December 2020, nearly 75% of population being vaccinated by March 2022. All the waves had a predictive pattern of subsiding with more restrictions, and emerging again when the said restrictions were removed. Stringency Index - a composite measure based on nine response indicators including school closures, workplace closures, travel bans, stay-at-home requirements, face covering, contact tracing, testing policy and public information campaigns, rescaled to a value from 0 to 100 (100 = strictest) was used as a Government response tracker (Fig. 2). Conclusions. Six waves were registered during the COVID-19 outbreak in Israel. Vaccination and government's response policies, limiting possible contacts and corona virus spread, and early detection by testing on a large scale, played an essential role in determining the direction of the outbreak.