sit in a cafe, eat at a restaurant, go back to school benches… Israel was almost back to normal, Sunday March 7, 2021, thanks to new deconfinement measures a fortnight of new national elections. These measures, validated Saturday evening by the government, were eagerly awaited by the Israelis since the gradual exit of the country from its third confinement in mid-February, made possible by a massive vaccination campaign.
“Almost normal return to normal”, “Open”, “Return to normal, with caution”, headlined the main national dailies, respectively. Yediot Aharonot, the best-selling title in the country, Maariv and free Israël Hayom. “It’s a wonderful day, we open restaurants with the green passport, we return to life,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, seated on the terrace, on a sunny morning, in a Jerusalem cafe with the Israeli mayor of the Holy City, Moshe Leon.
“Like an air of spring”
Once again on Saturday, the Israelis had to take their coffee to go, but since Sunday they can sit on the terrace. And bars and restaurants can now reopen for holders of the “green passport”, a permit granted to people who have received two doses of the vaccine or recovered from Covid-19. “With this reopening, we feel like an air of spring […], restaurateurs have had a year of misery, so we said to ourselves that we had to show our solidarity now that we can. We must support the restaurants, ”testifies Shimon Chasin, who came to have a bite to eat with his wife and friends at the Azura restaurant in Jerusalem.
This reopening comes at the right time for Benyamin Netanyahu, who fully plays the card of the “Vaccine Nation” (“the country of the vaccine”, Editor’s note), underlining a return to normal favored by intensive vaccination, in an attempt to win the legislative elections on March 23, the fourth in less than two years. The latest polls currently credit his party, the Likud (right), with first place, but without enough support, at present, to form a government with its allies.
More than half of the 9.3 million Israelis have received a first dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, to which Israel has privileged access under an agreement to share biomedical data on the effects of vaccination. And about 40% of Israelis received the second dose of the vaccine.
Airport, restaurants, variants
According to the new measures to ease the restrictions that came into force on Sunday, schoolchildren will be able to resume their studies in person in areas of the country where the contamination rate remains low. Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, closed since the end of January except for cargo flights and special flights allowing a maximum of 200 people to return to the country per day, has seen its reception capacity increase to 1,000 travelers per day from New York, Frankfurt, Paris, London, Kiev, Toronto and Hong Kong. That number is expected to rise to 3,000 by midweek.
The vaccination campaign, which began on December 19, helped reduce the number of contaminations, which dropped from a peak of 10,000 per day in mid-January to around 3,600 per day last week. Despite this deconfinement, public health officials remain cautious, however, especially as the number of people getting vaccinated is starting to level off and variants of the virus continue to circulate.
“If we do not act responsibly, if we do not follow the guidelines, the possibility of a fourth lockdown before the elections exists,” Nachman Ash, the coordinator of the fight against the coronavirus, warned this weekend. “Our main concern, and I say this without wanting to play politics, is a fourth, even fifth confinement,” notes chef Asaf Serri, head of the Tzemah restaurant in Jerusalem. “With the debts that have accumulated, rent, municipal taxes and other charges […], it will be really difficult to get up. ”
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