The fate of Israel’s COVID-19 crisis rests on what happens at Ben-Gurion Airport, where coronavirus testing can take up to two hours – and results may never arrive.
“We are playing a game of Russian roulette,” said Dr. Michael Halberthal, Director-General of Haifa’s Rambam Health Care Campus. “We need to move quickly and efficiently [to solve the situation] and not depend on being lucky that nothing will happen.”
Today, when passengers arrive at the airport, they are each ushered to one of 60 coronavirus testing stations set up by Femi Premium, a company recruited by the Health Ministry to carry out mandatory screening at the complex – at least for now.
A person can wait in line from as little as two-and-a-half minutes to as long as two hours, sources closely connected to the airport told The Jerusalem Post.
Once a person is tested, their specimen is transferred from the airport to one of three external labs located up to 103 kilometers from the complex in Jerusalem, Beersheba or Omer.
The labs then process the tests and send the results to the Health Ministry and health funds.
The ministry uploads the data to a joint website it runs with Femi that provides results for people who are not members of a health fund, such as tourists. The funds are required to tell their own clients if they are positive or negative for coronavirus.
Results can come within 24 hours. However, in many cases, the Post has learned, they can take as long as 10 days to arrive – if they arrive at all.
While travelers are waiting, they are not required to enter isolation if they have been fully vaccinated – unless they are returning from a “banned” country where the infection rate is extremely high. As such, they could be walking around and infecting others while waiting for their results.
The Health Ministry reported in recent days that more than half of infected incoming passengers are vaccinated.
TWO WEEKS ago Friday, some 2,800 vaccinated passengers were sent home at the direction of Health Minister Director-General Chezy Levy without being screened because the situation was bottle-necked to such an extent that travelers could not be tested before Shabbat, and the crowding was almost as dangerous as the lack of screening.
On Tuesday, it was reported that passengers returning from red countries would be separated from those traveling from everywhere else and would land in Terminal 1 instead of 3.
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that Maj.-Gen. (res.) Roni Numa had been appointed as the country’s first airport czar.
“For a year and a half now, there has been a huge national weak point, and that is Ben-Gurion Airport,” Bennett said on Sunday. “Therefore, in coordination with the transportation minister, the health minister and the interior minister, we decided to appoint a special director to handle transitions and prevent the entry of this virus – and future variants and viruses from around the world – into Israel.”
But the situation at the airport, while always the country’s coronavirus achilles heel, was very different before June 15 when Femi took over managing screening for arriving passengers from Check2Fly, a partnership of Rambam and the Omega testing company.
“I warned the Health and Finance ministries that there would be a catastrophe,” Halberthal told the Post. “We [Rambam] understood the extreme difficulties of delivering an effective and efficient testing system.”
HOW DID Israel get here? A short timeline can help:
July 2020: The Airports Authority, the National Security Council and the Health and Transportation ministries met to begin the preliminary work on a tender to hire a private company to establish fast coronavirus testing labs on behalf of Ben-Gurion Airport.
August 2020: The Airports Authority issued a public tender open to any company that wanted to apply.
The reason the tender was established by the Airports Authority, under the auspices of the Transportation Ministry, was because the Health Ministry did not believe in testing at the airport at the time, someone close to the situation told the Post. Rather, the ministry was convinced that isolation was the only solution for someone returning from abroad.
By the end of the month, the authority selected Omega. The lab would be available to incoming passengers and to people traveling out of Israel to countries that require them to present a negative coronavirus test, the Transportation Ministry announced.
November 2020: Check2Fly launched.
Government officials appeared joyful at the opening of the airport lab, which was inaugurated at an event attended by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Transportation minister Miri Regev and former Health minister Yuli Edelstein.
Gold-standard PCR tests were offered with results delivered within 14 hours for NIS 45. Check2Fly set up a lab inside the airport and tests were processed on location.
Although returning passengers were still required to enter 14 days of quarantine upon return from a red country, the Health Ministry has approved shortening that window to 12 days for people who had two negative tests a certain number of days apart. The window was later shortened to 10 days.
January 2021: The Health Ministry approved Omega’s rapid PCR tests, with results delivered within four hours. However, the tests were unusable because the airport was closed. Many Israelis were stranded abroad due to the government’s restrictions.
March 2021: The High Court ruled that the airport must be opened to all citizens ahead of the March 23 election and Omega’s rapid tests were launched.
At the same time, the Health Ministry determined that anyone entering Israel must take a COVID test on arrival and told the Transportation Ministry that it would take over from Omega. It committed to rolling out a new tender for testing to be overseen directly by the Health Ministry – though this tender has still not been issued.
May 2021: It was announced that Check2Fly would soon cease offering screening for incoming travelers and potentially also for outgoing ones, though the latter was for a very different reason than the former.
June 1, 2021: The Health Ministry stopped supplementing the cost of COVID-19 tests for returnees, which until then had been free, and told Check2Fly that it would now have to charge for screening travelers as they arrive.
June 15, 2021: The company providing PCR tests was switched from Check2fly to Test & Go, operated by Femi. There was no transition period between the two companies; Check2Fly moved out and Femi moved in almost overnight.
Bennett was sworn in the day before.
FEMI IS only filling a temporary void. The tender for a new testing center is expected to be published by the end of the week, a company who plans to apply told the Post. A representative connected to Femi said it is unclear how long the tender would be open for applications, but it is expected to take at least three months. Other reports said the process could take only a matter of weeks.
Concurrently, Check2Fly is expected to be ousted from providing tests for outgoing passengers as well.
Why?
After Omega won the tender, Pangea, the company that came in second, had appealed to the court, saying that Omega did not meet the criteria of the Airport Authority’s tender. Halberthal said that according to the tender, Rambam and Omega were supposed to be partners and “because we were a government hospital, we were not partnering but instead advisers – and because of that, the ruling of the court was that we did not stand up to the specifications of the tender.”
The Post confirmed Halberthal’s claim with a third company that was also closely aware of the case.
Because of Pangea’s appeal, the court gave the tender back to the Airport Authority, which decided to cancel it for incoming travelers since the Health Ministry requested to take over that aspect of the operation. At the same time, it offered Pangea to take over for Omega.
However, a third company, AID Genomics, which had come in third in the original tender process, protested the decision with the court and said that Pangea was less qualified than they were and that the decision of who should offer testing at the airport should not be based on price alone.
Omega was the cheapest company, followed by Pangea and then AID Genomics.
A health expert told the Post that there are companies in Israel with extensive experience in the field of diagnostics that have accompanied the country throughout the COVID crisis, performed millions of tests – and that in an era when the coronavirus is no longer the original strain, but has mutated into different variants, it is extremely important that coronavirus tests offer genetic sequencing at the same time: something that neither Pangea nor Femi can do.
“This is critical for early detection of variants,” the expert said.
The case is still frozen in court.
MEANWHILE, a senior official with one of the competing testing companies said that the hope is that with a new government in place and the ministries working together, the next tender will be issued to find a company that can handle both incoming and outgoing travelers.
It is especially confusing for travelers now. They can still go to the Check2Fly site and try to book a test for their return date. The site does not tell them that the company is no longer conducting these tests. Rather, it just shows that all the available appointments are booked.
At the same time, neither communication with Femi nor the Health Ministry has reportedly been strong. Tourists who cannot get their results through their health fund are supposed to be given a note with the URL of the Femi-Health Ministry site where they can access their results, but many are not. And if it is lost, locating the site is not an easy search.
Furthermore, some of the people who tried to get their results from the site said it was not working.
A spokesperson for Femi admitted there had been some technical challenges but they have since been rectified.
Numa has not yet announced his plans and did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, people are getting sick.
On Tuesday, nearly 300 people were diagnosed with corona.
“Last night, Rambam received a tourist from South Africa who entered the country on June 18,” Halberthal said. “She had only been vaccinated once and the test she took at the airport was negative – or so she thought. Two days later, she had symptomatic COVID and tested positive. She is now hospitalized. Obviously, she was not in isolation.”
South Africa is a banned country.
The failure of the previous government to effectively manage Ben-Gurion Airport played a major role in exacerbating the coronavirus crisis that ultimately led to many of the more than 6,000 Israeli deaths.
Bennett said he is aware of the “bugs” at the airport: “We are on this and it will be dealt with.”
But when it comes to Bennett’s handling of the COVID crisis, he himself is still being tested.
Rossella Tercatin contributed to this report.