The number of recovered coronavirus patients in Israel has exceeded the number of new patients over the past three days, according to the Health Ministry’s data. On Sunday, 226 new Israeli coronavirus patients were diagnosed and 298 recovered from the disease. On Saturday, 283 new patients were diagnosed and 330 recovered. On Friday, April 17, 224 new patients were diagnosed and 308 recovered.
This is the first time that the number of people recovering from the disease exceeds the number of people infected with the virus for three days in a row. At the same time, there has been a decline in the number of patients who need artificial ventilation. Over the past four days, that number has dropped from 137 to 114.
In the recent past, the decrease in the number of patients on artificial ventilators was more often than not the result of their death. However, the pattern until very recently used to be that the death of patients was accompanied by an increase in the number of patients whose health was rapidly deteriorating. This has not been the case these past few days.
Over the past four days, the spread of the disease has also stopped in Israel’s Haredi communities. These data may indicate the end of the first wave of the pandemic in Israel, and some experts believe that the peak of the outbreak of the virus is behind us.
The conclusions regarding the declining trend are bolstered by the fact that there has been a significant increase in the number of tests done in Israel, and what is known so far about the progression of the disease: most patients will have symptoms as early as the first week after infection, and by the 11th day, as many as 97% of patients exhibit the symptoms. These patients for the most part are diagnosed shortly after the onset of symptoms. The recovery process, however, is longer and lasts between four and six weeks. This means that the entry phase to the disease is much faster than the exit, which is why the rate of recovery has been slower than the rate of new infections.
This means that when the number of new cases and the number of recoveries are equal is actually good news, even more so when recoveries exceed new infections.
Should the trend continue, there may be reason to believe that the country as a whole is about to come out of the crisis in the next one or two cycles, meaning 14 or 28 days.