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100 doctors protest Israel’s COVID-19 restrictions

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Over 100 doctors in Israel have signed a letter of protest against the government’s COVID-19 lockdowns and its alternative restrictions such as the closure of schools, the Times of Israel (TOI) reported Sunday. The physicians’ protest was made as the number of daily coronavirus cases in Israel surged to nearly 3,000 Tuesday through Friday last week, and as a new wave of restrictions looked likely.

Having already imposed two nationwide lockdowns since the pandemic began, Israel’s government has determined that restrictions will be reimposed if the daily number of COVID-19 cases hits an average of 2,500 daily cases for a whole week, or if it reaches a basic reproduction number of over 1.32, TOI reports. The Health Ministry said the reproduction number was at 1.27 last week: any figure above one indicates an uptick in the rate of infection.

Aired on Israel’s Channel 12 on Saturday, the letter reads: “We, doctors in Israel, strongly protest the coercive measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, including lockdowns, curfews, closing down the school system, surveillance, and restrictions on movement.” The doctors reject the notion that drastic measures are needed to protect hospitals from being unable to cope with the numbers of patients requiring hospitalization: “With proper preparations, the coronavirus cannot bring down the healthcare system in Israel,” they said.

The government’s restrictions are “devoid of medical justification,” and “destructive to civil rights,” the doctors continued. “The coercive steps taken in the past nine months in the country express a loss of values and are contrary to the ethical foundations of medicine,” the letter added.

According to the doctors, the coronavirus crisis can be managed “by taking consensual steps, through advocacy and civil cooperation,” TOI reports. As of Saturday night, Israel reportedly had 24,223 active coronavirus cases and 3,074 deaths in a population of nearly 9 million people.