Health professionals: there are no easy answers to coronavirus crisis

“We had to make decisions we never thought we would have to make about closing the skies and closing the country in lockdowns.”

By HANNAH BROWN
Jerusalemites wearing face masks for fear of coronavirus walk on Jaffa road in the City Center of Jerusalem on July 12, 2020. Israel has seen a spike of new COVID-19 cases, cabinet ministers imposed new restrictions on public gatherings in a bid to stem the rising infection rate of the coronavirus (photo credit: OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90)
Jerusalemites wearing face masks for fear of coronavirus walk on Jaffa road in the City Center of Jerusalem on July 12, 2020. Israel has seen a spike of new COVID-19 cases, cabinet ministers imposed new restrictions on public gatherings in a bid to stem the rising infection rate of the coronavirus
(photo credit: OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90)
Anyone looking for definite answers about how Israel should handle the continuing COVID-19 crisis would have been disappointed by the experts at the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research conference at the Dead Sea on the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday.
While on Tuesday, several senior Health Ministry officials offered different assessments of the severity of the virus, Health Ministry director-general Chezy Levy, speaking at the conference from his office, chose to give a thoughtful look back at how Israel has handled the outbreak rather than offering suggestions for the future. Levy and most speakers highlighted how the pandemic had taken the country by surprise and how so many of the plans and predictions made early on turned out to be useless or incorrect.
Several speakers cited the frantic acquisition of ventilators, most of which have gone unused, as an example of misguided planning. But they also said that there was no way to have known at the beginning of the crisis what would be needed and noted that the pandemic had thrown a spotlight on the manpower crisis in Israeli hospitals and that trained nurses were needed far more urgently than any piece of equipment.
Speaking as “a hospital director,” Levy, who was the director of Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon prior to taking his position at the ministry, said, “We had to cope with something our generation had never seen, and had just read about, learning about it at the same time it was happening.” While running a hospital in the south; “We know about preparing for disasters, we know how to get ready to survive a war or missile attacks for 48 hours,” but admitted that he and the rest of the medical establishment were taken by surprise by a crisis that still has not ended.
Switching gears and talking from his experience as a senior Health Ministry official, he said: “We had to make decisions we never thought we would have to make about closing the skies and closing the country in lockdowns.”
Speaking candidly about the different pressures the Health Ministry has faced, he said: “We stopped the first wave with a heavy price in the first lockdown, economically there was a price... Every minster has his own agenda and you are in the middle.”
He concluded his talk with a heartfelt thanks to the medical personnel who had worked selflessly to stem the tide of the virus, and added, “It’s an event that I hope I won’t see another one like it in my lifetime and I hope everyone won’t... I hope future generations will look back at us in 100 years, like we are doing with the Spanish flu and say, all right, they did something, let’s learn from them.”
Another speaker, Prof. Jonathan Halevy, who until recently was the director-general of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem and is currently the hospital’s president, emphasized how much the medical professionals still do not know about the virus, such as the rate of transmission from asymptomatic people who are infected, long-term heart damage in people who only had mild symptoms and how people become reinfected.
Citing Maimonides’ idea of the “Golden Mean,” he said that health professionals had to walk a fine line between those who would deny the virus’ harmfulness and those who are hysterical about it. The lockdowns and extreme regulations have to be balanced with the cost of those measures. “We have to think about how many people are saved versus how many people are injured from the measures used,” due to increases in mental illnesses, suicides and other negative effects of lockdowns, Halevy explained.
Speaking about how the vaccines might bring an end to the crisis, Prof. Nadav Davidovitch of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev said that it would be a challenge to get the public to accept that government’s words that the vaccines are safe and effective. He said it would be important to combat the public’s skepticism about vaccines.
Referencing the recent political crisis that seems to be leading to the breakup of the government, he said: “When the government has a crisis of belief in itself, it’s hard to get people to believe in the virus management by the government,” and noted that poking fun at the lack of logic in government virus regulations “has become a national sport.”
Dr. Adi Niv-Yagoda cautioned: “This distrust of the government may remain long after the end of the virus.”