Abstract
The first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Israel on February 21, 2020. Within approximately 30 days, the total number of confirmed cases climbed up to 1, 000, accompanied by a doubling period of less than 3 days. About one week later, after this number exceeded 4,000 cases, and following some extremely strict measures taken by the Israeli government, the daily detection rate started a sharp decrease from the peak value of 1, 131 down to slightly more than 100 new confirmed cases on April 30. Motivated by this encouraging data, similar to the trends observed in many other countries, along with the growing economic pressures, the Israeli government started relaxing its emergency regulations as part of an “exit strategy”. This article attempts to analyze the currently available data on Israel and a country of similar size (Sweden) in order to understand the local dynamics of COVID-19, assess the effect of the implemented intervention measures, and discuss some plausible scenarios for the foreseeable future.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Funding Statement
No external funding was received for this work
Author Declarations
All relevant ethical guidelines have been followed; any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained and details of the IRB/oversight body are included in the manuscript.
Yes
All necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived.
Yes
I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).
Yes
I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable.
Yes
Data Availability
The daily case count data in Israel and other countries is available from the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform compiled by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CCSE). The coronavirus testing data in Israel is available from the COVID-19 Data Repository of the Israeli Ministry of Health.