Israel’s Health Ministry will likely recommend reinstatement of the indoor mask mandate by Sunday due to the surge of coronavirus cases over the past week.

The indoor mask mandate was lifted last week.

Over 100 new virus cases were confirmed on Wednesday morning for the third day in the row. Also on Wednesday, the northern town of Binyamina, near Haifa, was declared a “red zone,” the first locale designated as such in months. The positivity rate in the town is 3%, ten times higher than the rest of Israel. There are currently 1,107 residents in quarantine in the town of about 15,000.

“A decision has been made that once we have a daily average of 100 cases over one week, we will bring back masks in confined spaces,” Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, the head of the Health Ministry’s Public Health division, told Ynet on Thursday. “I assume this will happen as early as Sunday in light of the very fast spread we’re seeing.”

“We were always ready for it, we kept saying ‘the pandemic is not behind us’. We keep monitoring, checking, closing borders and doing everything we can because the virus can return.”

Dr. Alroy-Preis noted that although the ministry will recommend reinstating the mask mandate, it is up to the government to enforce it. “We have to remember the Health Ministry is not the enforcement body in the state of Israel. The problem here is enforcement. We have a very clear policy about where Israelis shouldn’t travel but it needs to be enforced. It’s really our Achilles’ heel.”

Alroy-Preis believes that the violation of quarantine laws by Israelis returning from high-risk countries is the main cause of the recent outbreaks. “We know that only about 30% of people maintain self-quarantine. People returning from abroad don’t stay in self-isolation and can spread the disease. That’s how the Delta variant made its way to us. Quarantine enforcement should be a priority for law enforcement agencies.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)