The government's response to coronavirus is a national embarrassment

The government of the State of Israel was caught completely unprepared and unequipped with the prospect of a pandemic.

JUNE 5, 2020 08:52

OUTGOING HEALTH Ministry director-general Moshe Bar Siman Tov appears at a press briefing at the Prime Ministers office last month (photo credit: FLASH90) — OUTGOING HEALTH Ministry director-general Moshe Bar Siman Tov appears at a press briefing at the Prime Ministers office last month

(photo credit: FLASH90)

Slowly, a very clear picture of the helplessness, embarrassment, lack of preparation and resourcefulness gave rise to an atmosphere of panic that was typical of the way the government operated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or more accurately – the way the prime minister instructed us to act during the crisis. It’s quite clear, then, that the person who handled every aspect of this affair from the start was the one person who everyone obeyed and submitted to regarding every decision.

Moshe Bar Siman Tov, known as Barsi, the Health Ministry’s director-general, offered dry and matter-of-fact updates without any further drama, without first being prepped with make-up and hair colorant before going on the air. He didn’t engage in any fake nose-blowing with a tissue at the ready or make any theatrical hand movements.

Bar Siman Tov was undoubtedly steadfast in the way he presented the Health Ministry’s position. It was the prime minister who turned the evening COVID-19 television broadcasts into theatrical performances designed to set the scene for the bizarre partnership coalition that was planning to declare a long-standing state of emergency.

But first we must go back in time and take a look at where it all began. The government of the State of Israel was caught completely unprepared and unequipped with the prospect of a pandemic, which began developing in December. At first, the virus began spreading quietly and secretly, out of sight, even from Israel’s routine health identification systems. In January, the pandemic became visible, as it began spreading in distant countries, and then soon enough it had arrived in Israel, too.

When the epidemic was first identified, the State of Israel found itself without the proper personal protective equipment or sufficient ventilators, which public health experts claimed we would need. Neither were we in possession of a sufficient amount of cotton swabs, pads and masks, or other life-saving items that are necessary during a health crisis. Having these items on hand during an epidemic constitutes the difference between the possibility of coping effectively or falling prey to panic, hysteria and a community-wide feeling of helplessness.

One doesn’t need to be a public health expert, a skilled doctor or an experienced professor of a medical institution to understand the wisdom of the actions of people who have experience, who know that the most urgent and effective mode of action required to prepare for the onset of an pandemic, with which we are still dealing, is to equip ourselves with the ability to conduct mass-scale testing. Only after analyzing this data can we obtain an accurate picture of the spread of contagion, the indices that characterize it, including the age range of those who are most likely to become infected, listed by location, typical symptoms of the infection and typical side effects.

Had Israel not neglected its health system for years, government leaders might have concerned themselves with acquiring all of the equipment needed to deal with the health crisis and making sure the country’s storage rooms were well stocked with emergency life-saving equipment.

But even when it became clear to senior Health Ministry officials, and probably to the prime minister himself, in late December and early January, that we were not in possession of said equipment, when it still would have been possible to acquire all such equipment at cheap prices and in any quantity we wanted, from various locales around the world, still no action was taken.

So, not only were we not equipped to deal with COVID-19 ahead of time, but we also didn’t begin purchasing the necessary items, even after we foresaw what was coming. If we had, we could have managed during January, February and the first half of March to test almost half of the population and then construct an extremely detailed database, which would have enabled us to take measured, restrained, precise and focused actions to contain the contagion by quarantining anyone who was infected with the virus and locking down any area with higher rates of infection, as well as nursing homes, which house elderly populations with high mortality rates.

INSTEAD, OUR LEADERS chose a different path – one that invoked mass hysteria and had two specific aims: First, to cover up for the shortage of essential equipment. Second, to allow the prime minister to turn the struggle to overcome the COVID-19 crisis, at least for a short time, into a platform for taking complete control of the media and public discourse. The pandemic enabled him to create an atmosphere of near-existential disaster, which helped the prime minister shake up the political landscape and goad his political adversaries to reach an agreement that was unlikely to become sustainable.

The failure to perform these tests is an absolute scandal. At one point during the pandemic, the prime minister committed to making 30,000 tests a day available within two weeks. I believe that if the Health Ministry and the health funds had taken the proper steps to get their hands on test kits, we would have been able to do 50,000 tests a day. If we had, we wouldn’t have been surprised at the sudden outbreak at the nursing homes in Beersheba and Jerusalem. By that point, we clearly understood how the contagion was spreading, and we could have taken the necessary preemptive steps to contain its growth.

And it’s a known fact that we are still not conducting tests at a fast enough rate to enable us to achieve a precise picture of the scope of the contagion, the potential for future spread and what its side effects are.

It turns out that it’s much easier to create a frenzy of historic proportions. The more you review the prime minister’s remarks, the more you realize that they produced a feeling of panic like we haven’t seen since the Middle Ages. He compared COVID-19 to the Holocaust on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, saying that we didn’t recognize the signs leading up to the Holocaust in a timely manner, but we did foresee the COVID-19 outbreak, and that’s why we were able to prevent a colossal disaster.

Next, he predicted that millions of citizens would become infected with the virus by the end of April, with tens of thousands of deaths. Netanyahu was not the only one who made these dire predictions. Health Ministry leaders also predicted thousands of deaths. In retrospect, Rabbi Ya’acov Litzman, who was health minister at the time, admitted that he thought these estimates were exaggerated and might lead to superfluous panic that could harm society’s ability to cope. If this is actually what he thought, who are we to come to him with complaints about why his voice was not heard. No voice was loud enough or explosive enough to overcome the hysterical noise coming out of the prime minister’s nightly TV performances.

I WOULD like to once again reiterate statements, some of which I already made two months ago in my weekly column here in this newspaper, since I feel that they have not permeated enough into the public’s consciousness.

The remarks made by the prime minister, from the comparison with the Middle Ages and then to the Holocaust and the prediction of how many people would become infected and die, raise the following question: Were these outrageous, false and premeditated statements made by someone who was hoping to elicit support from a frightened public in order to enforce the lockdown, to control people through fearmongering, to abolish all regular community and civic activity, including court cases, which held a special interest for him? Or were these orders simply an expression that fell in line with the prime minister’s personality: cowardice, panic, inability to remain calm during crisis situations and a tendency to utilize the most extreme means to escape?

We don’t need to think too hard in order to figure out which of the two situations was the real one – the prime minister’s calculated desire to stir up panic or the prime minister’s frenzy – since they’re both true. Not to mention his desire for Israelis to collectively feel helpless, panicked and insecure, which would enable the prime minister to manage everything in a way that is consistent with his own personal needs.

We are still in the midst of coping with this outbreak, and it appears that we haven’t learned any lessons or come to any conclusions regarding how to deal with the epidemiological markers and the risks involved.

Mass testing is still not being carried out. There’s no plausible explanation, no logic to the stubborn refusal of Health Ministry leaders to conduct mass testing for every citizen located in every corner of the country, to relaying test results to people within a few hours instead of days, to map the location of all those infected, to characterize the side effects and take the appropriate steps needed to reduce to a minimum the unavoidable lockdowns, restrictions and lack of freedom of movement.

On what foundation do we need to declare a state of emergency? How are the Health Ministry leaders so sure that we’re going to experience a second wave of contagion? On what source of knowledge are they basing their projections about the numbers involved, when we haven’t even collected information about current infections? We can’t make informed decisions and take careful and reasonable action until we have this data.

This past weekend, when a sharp rise in the number of people who tested positive for COVID-19 was reported in the media, there was a clear expression of this government’s culture of panic. The rise in the number of Israelis infected with the virus immediately led to projections that we were about to be forced back into an emergency lockdown, and experience a reversal of the relief measures that had been adopted, including freedom of movement.

It soon became clear that the vast majority of the people who’d recently become infected were all from the same school, and that this in fact was not the beginning of a nationwide second wave of infection that would require the whole country to once again take extra precautions, as had initially been suggested. Needless to say, this negligible event did not absolve the prime minister from his duty to appear in his typical theatrical way on every TV channel and engage in the drama that was intended to enhance his aura of great leadership capabilities, which had no connection with the COVID-19 outbreak or the dangers involved with the potential spread of contagion.

IN THE END, many people might say that the words I write here so emphatically do not mesh well with the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of people all around the world, and that some countries like the US have suffered from a staggering number of deaths, and that countries like the UK, Sweden and many other advanced and developed nations have paid a much higher price than we have here in Israel.

And perhaps contrary to everything I say, the hysteria and panic as I present them were more effective tactics than those used in many other countries. The logic behind this dilemma is based on the following simple supposition: There’s no way to prove that if we had operated in a different manner, we would have achieved better results. Some countries acted completely irresponsibly, and with utter disdain, without taking any precautions, for which they’ve had to pay a heavy price. Other countries woke up in time and took effective steps to prevent the spread of contagion, which led to impressive results.

On the one hand there are countries like the US, the UK and Sweden, and on the other hand there are places like South Korea, Taiwan and the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip where numbers are much lower than Israel’s. When you look purely at the statistics, it’s clear that the State of Israel cannot boast of any exceptional achievements. From a medical point of view, however, Israel can certainly be proud of the way it has functioned so competently.

Also, in this case, I recommend that we stick to more realistic proportions. While we rely on reports in the media, in special TV broadcasts and on the overly dramatic national pride for our medical teams, we also need to remember that the number of COVID-19 patients who’d been intubated and put on ventilators never surpassed 200 at any given moment. In addition, the number of COVID-19 patients in serious condition was only a few hundred even at its peak. Most of the people infected with the virus were never hospitalized and were allowed to quarantine at home or in one of the hotels requisitioned for this purpose.

Israeli hospitals, which had been prepped to receive tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients, in the end only had to handle a much smaller number of Israelis who’d been infected.

In short, there never really was an emergency situation or a reason for the excessive panic. The Israeli medical teams successfully treated all of the COVID-19 patients, including those in serious condition and those who were put on ventilators, without any problem, while also continuing to maintain overall functioning of regular hospital activity.

Toward the beginning of the pandemic, there were reports in the media about heroic missions that were carried out by the Mossad and Israel’s secret security establishment to procure masks and ventilators. In the end, only 10% of these were actually used, and we were able to avoid even the perception and the exaggerated presentation of the risk of apocalypse could have taken over our lives.

And I haven’t yet said anything about all of the negative ways that the COVID-19 lockdown affected our lives, such as restricted movement, increased unemployment, factory production that came to a halt, all cafés and restaurants closing their doors, cultural events and performances being canceled, flights halted and almost the entire tourism industry, including all hotels, put on hold.

The economic ramifications of the lockdown will continue to affect Israel’s market for many years to come. We haven’t even begun to estimate the social damage. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been living in near-complete isolation for a number of months and hundreds of people with illnesses have refrained from going to the hospital for checkups or to receive life-saving treatments, for fear of becoming infected with the contagious virus. All of these are examples of the undisputed and immense damaging results of the pandemic.

Why is it so important to me now to reiterate these claims? Because what happened may happen again and in the blink of an eye, the prime minister could return to a model we’ve already experimented with if the number of people infected increases even slightly in the coming weeks. What happened might return.

In the meantime, not enough tests will be conducted and the database we desperately need in order to understand the behavior of the virus, its transmission patterns, its side effects and long-term effects, will not be compiled.

The “father of our nation,” who is currently on trial, will, however, request a few more moments of fake TV fame before his sentencing is completed.

The writer was the 12th prime minister of Israel.