Israel on Saturday said it would ban all foreigners from entering the country, boasting of being the first country to close its borders completely to deal with the Omigran strain, and said it would use anti-terrorism phone surveillance technology to control the spread of the Omigran strain. , Which was first discovered in South Africa.
Prime Minister Naphtali Bennett said in a statement that the ban would last for 14 days and would be approved by the government.
Officials hope that more information on the effectiveness of the Govit-19 vaccine against Omicron, described by the World Health Organization as “dangerous,” will be available at that time.
“Our working hypotheses are that this strain already exists in every country and that the vaccine will be effective, however we still do not know to what extent,” Interior Minister Ailet Sheikh told N12.
Bennett said Israelis entering the country, including those who have been vaccinated, should be kept in isolation. The ban will take effect between midnight on Sunday and Monday. On Friday, foreigners from most African countries were barred from entering.
The report said that the Internal Security Agency’s (Shin Pet) phone tracking technology will be used to detect carriers of the new strain of the virus in order to control the spread of the virus to others.
Surveillance technology has been in constant use since March 2020 as the locations of virus carriers are being compared with other mobile phones nearby to determine who they were in contact with. The Supreme Court of Israel this year limited the scope of its application after civil rights groups appealed on privacy concerns.
New strain has also been detected in Belgium, Botswana, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany and the UK and triggered waves of global anxiety and travel restrictions, although epidemiologists say it is too late to impose such restrictions to prevent the spread of Omicron worldwide.
Israel has so far confirmed one case of Omigran mutation and seven suspected cases.
The Ministry of Health did not say whether the confirmed case was vaccinated. On Saturday, the ministry said three of the seven suspected cases had been fully vaccinated and three had not returned from a recent foreign trip.
The Ministry of Health says that about 57 percent of Israel’s 9.4 million people have been fully vaccinated, meaning that they have received the third dose of Pfizer / Biotech vaccine or less than five months after their second dose.
There have been 1.3 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 8,000 deaths reported in Israel since the outbreak.
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