Why Israel’s Covid deaths increase may bode ill for the UK

A spike in Covid-19 deaths in one of the most highly vaccinated populations in the world is causing widespread concern among countries poised to lift coronavirus restrictions.

A total of 679 people died from the virus last month in Israel, according to latest figures released by the nation’s Health Ministry. The steep increase has triggered fears that the “vaccine star of the pandemic” is succumbing to the Omicron variant, The Telegraph reported.

Early warning

Israel “rolled out its initial jabs with great speed this time last year amid the deadly Alpha wave”, and “saw off Delta in the summer by pioneering booster shots”, said The Telegraph.

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But even though health leaders “made fourth doses available to medics and the elderly” following the arrival of Omicron, death rates in the Middle Eastern nation are “soaring”.

According to Haaretz, the recent spike in Covid-related fatalities “highlights once again the stark contrast between the vaccinated and unvaccinated”. Israelis “over 60 who are either unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated” died in “significantly higher numbers” in January “compared to people in their age cohort who are fully vaccinated”.

Official data shows that while only around 12% of over-60 Israelis are not fully inoculated against the coronavirus, they accounted for 43% of Covid deaths in their age group.

Professor Itamar Grotto, a former deputy director general of the Health Ministry, said that based on the latest figures, “the chances of death could be ten to 20 times more for the unvaccinated”.

“This death toll is partially related to the Delta variant, but many cases are related to Omicron,” he told the Tel Aviv-based newspaper. “This means that although the Omicron variant is milder, it is still causing a lot of illness and death due to its rapid spread.”

Attempts to assess the extent of the risk “have not been helped by a data glitch” that triggered a Health Ministry alert warning on Friday of a “false picture of reality” being shown on global tracking databases, The Telegraph reported.

But “even once this is accounted for”, the paper said, “deaths in Israel have climbed sharply over the last month”.

According to latest Oxford University tracking, Israel was reporting 4.95 deaths per million people as of 7 February. By contrast, the UK was recording 0.66 deaths per million and Denmark, which last week moved to scrap restrictions, was posting 4.82 per million.

Israel was also reporting a far higher number of cases, at 5,476 cases per million people, compared with 943 per million in the UK.

Covid deaths in Israel have risen from “next to nothing at the start of January” and are now “approaching the record rate” seen “at the peak of the Alpha wave”, The Telegraph said.

But some experts believe that countries with similar vaccination rates may not have major cause for concern.

Fatality outlier

Two factors are thought to be behind Israel’s sudden spike in deaths.

“First, although Israel’s headline vaccination rate once sat at the top of global vaccine charts, it has gradually slipped down to a middling position,” said The Telegraph. And “more importantly, perhaps, vaccination rates among the vulnerable are not as good as they might be”.

According to Health Ministry data, as of 31 January, “the death rate per 100,000 people for the over 60s stood at 16.3 for unvaccinated individuals, as opposed to 0.9 for the fully vaccinated”, Haaretz said. By contrast, the death rate per 100,000 people under 60 was “0.1 for the unvaccinated, 0.2 for the partially vaccinated and zero for the fully vaccinated”.

A “local expert” told The Telegraph that a lack of measures to control the spread of Omicron might also have impacted the country’s death rate. “Israel has basically let Omicron rip, eschewing almost all the layers of protections we had including PCR testing, quarantine for contacts of infected, etc,” the unnamed expert reportedly said.

The country’s top health advisor suggested at the start of the year that the expected “surge of Omicron cases could see the country reach Covid herd immunity”, the BBC reported. Health Ministry director Nachmann Ash said that “the price of herd immunity is very many infections and that may end up happening”.

“The numbers need to be high to reach herd immunity, it’s something that is possible,” he continued. “But we don't want to reach it by means of infections, we want it to happen as a result of many people vaccinating.”

Salman Zarka, head of the Health Ministry’s coronavirus taskforce, warned that herd immunity was not guaranteed by high infection rates. Zarka told journalists that “we have to be very cautious with this particularly in light of our experience over the past two years in which we saw people who have recovered be re-infected”.

For now, a “clear message” to countries including the UK “must be to keep vaccine-induced immunity topped up”, The Telegraph said. The data emerging from Israel shows “it is vaccines that are keeping us safe” and that while “Omicron may not be as dangerous as the Alpha or Delta variants”, it “remains on a par with the Wuhan original”.

Dr Barak Raveh, an assistant professor of biological modelling at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that Israel might “have been a bit too relaxed in terms of letting Omicron cases soar under the conception that it is a relatively mild disease”.

“Even if the Covid variant milder in some instances”, he told the paper, Israel has “ended up with crowded hospitals amidst an intense flu season and suffered a larger than expected number of severe cases and deaths”.