The dengarous phenomenom has become quite popular in several neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Residents of the Shuafat Refugee Camp and Kafr 'Aqab - areas that are under jurisdiction of the Jerusalem Municipality - have reportedly found ways of obtaining forged lab results that indicate that they are completely healthy, even if they are actually active coronavirus patients.
Obtaining the forged document begins by travelling to Ramallah or Bethlehem, where individuals can visit medical labs that provide paying coronavirus patients with fake permits indicating that their results came in clean.
Once they've received the fake results, patients return to their homes in East Jerusalem and present the fake document to their local medical provider, who then provides them with a permit that allows them to avoid quarantine and to go on with their lives as usual. The fake results can even be used to allow a coronavirus patient to leave the country.
A senior medical official in East Jerusalem told Israel Hayom that "these fake permits can be used to infect Jerusalem's residents without them knowing and can lead to a major increase in morbidity rates in the city."
"I personally know of dozens of such cases and I'm sure that there are many more. I visited Bethlehem recently. People don't use masks, and no one maintains coronavirus guidelines ... It's a dangerous situation," the official added.
According to Israel Hayom, awareness for maintaining coronavorus guidelines in many neighborhoods in East Jerusalem is lacking and requires immediate intervention in order to prevent the disease from spreading to other parts of the city and losing control of infection chains.