Nov 28, 2021: Israel says it will ban all foreigners from entering the country, and will become the first nation to completely close its borders in response to a new and potentially more contagious variant of corona virus, the omicron.
In a statement on Saturday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the ban would last 14 days after government approval.
The ban will come into effect at midnight between Sunday and Monday. A travel ban on foreigners coming from most African states was imposed on Friday. The new measures will also require all Israelis entering the country, including those who are vaccinated, to quarantine. Israelis who are vaccinated will have to quarantine for a minimum of three days, while those who are unvaccinated will have to quarantine for seven days.
In addition, Israeli Prime Minister Bennett said the Shin Bet Anti-Terrorism Agency’s phone tracking technology would be used to find new types of carriers to prevent its transfer to others. Used on and off since March 2020, surveillance technology has teamed up with other mobile phones close to virus carriers to determine who they came in contact with. Israel’s Supreme Court has limited its use this year when privacy concerns were raised by civil rights groups.
Officials hope to find out more about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine against omicron, which was first discovered in South Africa, and has been described by the World Health Organization as a “variant of concern”.
Similar outbreaks have been reported in Belgium, Botswana, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom and it may be too late to stop it from circulating globally.
Israel has so far confirmed one Omicron case with seven suspected cases. The health ministry did not say whether the man who had been confirmed had been vaccinated. The ministry said on Saturday that three of the seven suspected cases had been fully vaccinated, and three had not recently returned from a trip abroad.
About 57 percent of Israel’s 9.4 million population is fully vaccinated, according to the health ministry, which means they have either received a third shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine or it has not yet been five months since they received their second dose.
Israel has recorded 1.3 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 8,000 fatalities since the pandemic began.
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